Gautam Bhatia- a lawyer who believes that Judges can be sued for libel for things they say in open court- writes in Time magazine of the recent protests- led by Rahul Gandhi- in Delhi.
In Saturday, New Delhi, the Indian capital, was under siege.
This would be news to anyone living in Delhi. With the farm protest, there was a possibility of 'siege'. The current agitation is small in scale & has the air of something manufactured by the media during a 'slow-news' period.
The Indian government deployed more than 20,000 police and paramilitary personnel, barricaded the city center, and suspended internet access.
In a specific area. They had done the same thing in 2019 & 2021 in specific carea.
By evening, more than 7,000 people were detained by the police, including leaders from India’s opposition parties, lawyers, and journalists.
Rahul has pushed the boat out. Congress won in Kerala & retains Karnataka. Both states have sent party cadres. There are also Communist cadres from a Maoist party allied to Congress in Bihar. Mamta's loyalists too are in evidence.
Despite the crackdown, thousands turned out in Delhi on Monday to protest with even greater vigor.
Because the crackdown has been mild. Why? Presumably, the ruling party hopes that- as with the Shaheen Bagh, anti CAA, agitation- it will lead to Hindu consolidation against supposed Muslim 'infiltrators'. The dilemma for Akhilesh is that if Muslims desert him in favour of Owaisi's party (which has gained credibility thanks to its good performance in Bihar), then he loses for a third time and ceases to be a potential Chief Minister. He will be like Mayawati- important but not powerful.
The repressive effort sought to deter a planned protest at Jantar Mantar, a traditional protest site in New Delhi.
Previously, it was Boat Club till it was denotified. The same thing has now happened to Jantar Mantar. The BJP now rules Delhi. It has to curb protests there because the locals find them disruptive.
The protest centered on two core demands: the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner and the rollback of a nationwide process known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
In other words, illegal migrants should have the vote. So should dead people or those who moved away. The problem here is that if the ruling party in a State can control votes of this sort, then it can entrench itself. But 72 percent of the Indian population lives in BJP ruled states. If you cripple the Election Commission, then the BJP entrenches itself in the same way that Congress did till the Nineties when TN Sheshan beefed up the EC.
The chief election commissioner heads the national electoral body and is appointed on the recommendation of a committee headed by the prime minister.
This could change.
The SIR ostensibly seeks to clean up and update the electoral rolls but has removed 130 million Indians from the rolls—more than half the number of Americans eligible to vote in the midterm elections.
If you are alive, and have the right to vote, you can reinstate yourself easily enough. Dead people, however,
The troubles truly began in the summer of 2025. Several Indian states were about to hold elections for their state legislatures. Ahead of those elections, the Election Commission announced an electoral revision in those states, citing the need to “clean up” electoral rolls.
They are constitutionally mandated to revise the electoral roll.
Numerous voters would be required to prove that they were citizens
the allegation was that particular political parties were bringing in illegal migrants to act as a vote bank
and entitled to be on the rolls by producing one or more documents from a select list. Election Commission officials would scrutinize the documents and either accept or reject them.
This could be done online.
Judicial avoidance
Civil society groups and political activists promptly challenged the proposed electoral revisions before the Supreme Court of India in June 2025.
They challenge anything and everything.
They questioned the power of the Election Commission to undertake electoral revisions at such a scale. India’s election law does authorize the commission to undertake a revision of electoral rolls in specific electoral constituencies, provided it records its reasons in writing.
The law requires the Commission to revise electoral rolls. It must keep written records of all its actions.
The petitioners argued that it does not grant the Election Commission overarching power to require voters already on the rolls to prove their eligibility afresh.
You have to be alive to be eligible. The Commission has no business requiring dead people to prove they are alive. They should remain on the electoral roll.
The petitioners also argued that Election Commission’s list of acceptable documents was exclusionary and would result in large scale disenfranchisement. In India, access to documents issued by the government depends heavily on caste, class and gender. Many people simply lack necessary documents or the ability to navigate the bureaucracy to obtain them.
But they have no difficulty getting on the electorl roll even if they are dead.
For months, the Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of electoral revisions on such a vast scale,
they were legal. Only after a Court ruling of illegality would the exercise become illegal.
allowing the exercise to become a fait accompli. Instead, it engaged in prolonged courtroom negotiations
The Bench does not negotiate.
with the Election Commission over which documents Indian voters would have to provide to remain on the electoral rolls. There was an extended debate on whether Aadhaar, India’s national digital identity document, would be accepted.
But even as the legal debates continued, exclusions from electoral rolls mounted. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had never won a state election,
then the TMC- the ruling party there- split because Mamta was promoting her nephew as her successor. Her lieutenant joined the BJP. Voters, fed up with Mamta's corruption & criminality, voted for Adhikari. If the Election Commission is hamstrung, he can entrench himself in West Bengal. No doubt, all BJP voters have plenty of dead relatives who deserve the vote.
nine million people—around 12% percent of the electorate—found themselves excluded from the rolls.
This was particularly hurtful for dead people who were already experiencing social exclusion due to nobody was inviting them to birthday parties. The good news is that turnout rose to a record level. Thus more people voted after the exercise than before it
Faced with these exclusions, and still unwilling to rule on the legality of the SIR, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of creating an entire administrative machinery:
Bhatia does not understand the difference between an appellate body and administrative machinery. He is as stupid as shit.
tribunals staffed by judicial officers to hear appeals from excluded voters.
What's wrong with that?
When the petitioners warned that these tribunals would take years, if not decades, to resolve all the appeals, the Supreme Court judges
didn't believe them.
effectively said
Gautam Bhatia eats his own shit
that it was fine for excluded people to not vote in the upcoming election as long as they would eventually be put back on the rolls.
Fuck off! They said people excluded can't vote because they are not currently eligible to vote. However, they may regain that eligibility by inclusion in the electoral roll.
Similarly, a murderer currently serving a life-sentence is not eligible for release even if he has appealed his conviction and it may be many years before that appeal is heard. True, he may be declared innocent at a later time. But that doesn't mean he is innocent now.
The West Bengal election went ahead using the new electoral rolls and the BJP won.
Because there was a strong police presence from neighbouring states. When Mamata's goons tried to initimidate them, they were beaten. Since the goons didn't know where those policemen's families lived, they were not able to rape and kill their children. This meant that they had to run away with their tails between their legs.
One indication of how flawed the SIR may have been was that around 90% of the voters in West Bengal, whose appeals were decided, were eventually restored to the rolls.
That shows how efficient the appelate process was. Sadly, the appeals of dead people weren't decided- even when some pious soul had lodged such an appeal on their behalf.
Nine out of every ten excluded voters had been wrongfully removed.
Some of the software heuristics were questionable- e.g. having a dad who was over 50 when you were born.
Yet even as exclusions numbered in the millions in each state, the Supreme Court noted that the data did not indicate “systemic disenfranchisement.”
Because the data did not indicate it. Nor did it indicate that Gautam Bhatia eats his own shit. Still, that is what everybody is effectively saying, no matter what they are talking about or, indeed, even if they are maintaining a profound silence.
See what I just did? I used Bhatia style argumentation.
Unchecked bureaucrats
Eventually, when the Supreme Court finally issued its judgment in the summer of 2026, it upheld the entire exercise. It affirmed the wide powers of the Election Commission to conduct the electoral revisions as it saw fit.
Because that was what the EC was set up to do.
A central argument against the exercise was that by requiring every elector, including those already on the electoral rolls, to prove their eligibility afresh, the Election Commission was treating each individual as presumptively ineligible to vote.
Dead people are ineligible to vote. There is a presumption that all human beings are mortal- i.e. they may die at any time. This means there should be a presumption that every voter could have lost eligibility to vote.
This was a grossly disproportionate exercise of power, particularly because more proportionate methods were available to the election commission.
It could have presumed that very few humans die. Eating shit incessantly has made Gautam Bhatia a stupider shithead than nature intended.
The court rejected this argument too and, I believe, effectively immunized the commission from the requirement to act in a proportionate manner.
Gautam's beliefs are absurd. What comes out of his anus isn't really chocolate cake.
As the legal scholar Vasudev Devadasan
shithead
noted, the judgement had the effect of creating a "permanent class" of disenfranchised persons who simply cannot participate in political life.
e.g. dead people.
The consequences soon became apparent: the new BJP government in West Bengal threatened, on more than one occasion, to cut off welfare benefits for
dead people
people excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR. Although the Supreme Court noted that the SIR was not meant to determine citizenship,
but was meant to determine not being fucking dead
by the summer of 2026, that distinction was becoming difficult to sustain.
Only for people who are gobbling up lots of chocolate cake which came out of their own anuses.
Beyond the threat to people’s welfare entitlements, there were widely reported cases of passport renewals being denied because applicants had been excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR.
I widely report Bhatia's eating his own shit. This doesn't mean he will desist from doing so.
In 2020, the Indian government’s attempts to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) had been widely criticized because of how it would force every individual to prove their citizenship to state authorities, and lead to widespread exclusion.
of non-citizens.
After widespread protests across the country against it, the NRC was shelved.
It was too expensive. Ethnic cleansing is more cheaply done by mobs wielding agricultural implements.
The SIR now appeared to be a way of introducing the NRC through the backdoor.
Bhatia's backdoor produces delicious chocolate cake.
The truth is, currently, getting rid of illegal Muslim immigrants is popular everywhere though only Pakistan & Iran have done it on a large scale. We may say 'such and such policy or such and such judicial process aims at getting rid of Muslims' but, even if the thing is true, this helps whichever party is seen as more Islamophobic. On the other hand, if people really want to get rid of a particular minority, there is no substitute for going after them with pitchforks and flaming torches.
As the SIR proceeded across multiple states—with large-scale exclusions in each—patterns began to emerge: disproportionate exclusions among vulnerable and marginalized people
also the socially excluded dead
and of religious minorities, especially Muslims; and the use of algorithms to exclude even voters who possessed the required documents, citing "logical discrepancies" such an arbitrary age gap between parent and child, judged by arbitrary criteria that varied from state to state.
But it is easy to get your vote restored if you were entitled to it in the first place. For the very poor, there are political parties who will send people to your home to do it for you. It is likely that they will give you some nice gift and, on election day, take you to the voting booth and give you an appropriate reward.
Other disturbing facts also came to light. In certain neighborhoods, people had submitted pre-filled forms in bulk, seeking to have Muslims removed from off the electoral rolls by questioning their citizenship. India’s electoral law allows third parties to object to anyone’s inclusion on the electoral rolls.
Electoral fraud is a crime everywhere. All countries lets 'third parties' report crimes of any and every sort.
In Delhi, the omission of some prominent people from the rolls provoked public outrage. The Election Commission then introduced a “VIP portal”
there is no such thing. The online portal is accessible to everybody.
through which their names could be restored, creating a two-tier system of class privilege.
This is sheer fantasy.
A tenacious reporter
Against this backdrop, an investigative report by Ritika Chopra, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper in the last week of September, landed like a bombshell. Her report showed that although the Election Commission’s decisions were supposed to be taken by consensus among its three commissioners, the chief election commissioner had been taking them unilaterally, often over the objections of, and sometimes without involving, the other commissioners. (The Election Commission responded by describing differing “views and observations” as part of “deliberation in any institution.”)
The reason two extra Commissioners was introduced was so as to prevent it turning into an autocracy. But this also makes it difficult to scapegoat the Chief Commissioner.
More reports followed, documenting more unilateral decisions,
which the constitution requiresthe Commission to make
opaque algorithms built by private corporations,
why not have hackable algorithms built by pussy cats?
and the increasing centralization of authority
I suppose ECINet is meant. Is it dog shit? Probably. But it can be improved.
within the Election Commission to add or remove voters. It was a clear departure from India’s decentralized electoral system, which is designed to guard against decisions made in bad faith.
The Brits introduced elections. The system was and is centralized. It did not arise in an organic manner out of Parish & Municipal & Borough elections. Maybe, India had become a Federation, each State would have had its own Election Commission. But India is unitary. Elections were and are and will remain centralized.
These reports crystallized latent anger, particularly against the chief election commissioner. Under Indian electoral law, election commissioners are appointed by a committee in which the political executive holds a two-to-one majority; they are, in effect, executive appointments.
Just as Bhatia is, in effect, an eater of his own shit even if he is dining in an expensive election.
The Supreme Court’s 2023 attempt to reform this system was bypassed by subsequent legislation. The court then left a challenge to that legislation on the back burner. All of this explains why the chief election commissioner became the primary focus of public anger.
Not really. The guy lacks charisma. He can't defend himself. Make an Aunt Sally of him by all means- more particularly if you have nothing better to do.
The story of the SIR is
a bunch of stupid lies
both an account of large-scale voter disenfranchisement in India and one of institutional crisis. Two failures converged: the failure to entrench the Election Commission’s independence in law
It is completely independent in Law. I suppose Bhatia means, let it be self-appointing like the Bench. But that would change nothing.
and in the Constitution, and the failure of the Supreme Court to intervene despite evidence of disenfranchisement placed before it.
The evidence was false.
Together they culminated in the furious popular protests
Rahul & Priyanka are poor Muslim labourers. Their vote was taken away by evil Hindu bastid. That is why they are protesting.
in Delhi and the Indian government’s crackdown.
It is difficult to see how this story ends.
It is a silly-season story. It doesn't matter how it ends.
The right to vote is hard won
It was imposed by the Brits.
and its loss keenly felt.
Indians want to lose their vote in India because they want to become citizens of a richer country- preferably one with fewer Muslims.
History shows that once people lose confidence in the institutions meant to protect that right, restoring their trust is exceedingly difficult.
Bhatia's history shows he eats his own shit.
A long shadow hangs over electoral integrity in India.
No. One can either have an independent EC with the balls to crack down on voter fraud or you let the ruling party in the State to pad the rolls with phantom voters.
Lifting it will require urgent, systemic reforms.
Nope. There is a choice. The cheaper option is to turn a blind eye to dead people voting.
Whether those reforms will come remains uncertain.
What is certain is Bhatia, effectively, eats his own shit and will continue to do so in saecula saeculorum. That is true meaning of Indian Secularism. Mind it kindly.
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