5 min readOct 9, 2026 04:40 PM IST First published on: Oct 9, 2026 at 04:40 PM ISTIndia’s electoral system is robust and error-proof, and has received accolades from across the world. In August this year, US President Donald Trump acknowledged that fact in a post on Truth Social, citing it as an argument in support of his “Save America Act”. A group of 38 delegates from 22 countries visited India as part of the International Election Visitors Programme (IEVP) during the assembly elections held in April. “Indian voting… is a true festival of democracy for the whole world… what is overwhelming for me is the enthusiasm of people to vote… It’s a huge process and done right,” the Croatian delegate said. The delegate from Mexico said, “The process of election in India is certainly a place to learn”, and the Sierra Leone delegate observed that “one of the great things about India is the use of EVMs”.It is this reputation of our election process that the Opposition seeks to besmirch today, not because of any credible evidence but out of desperation and an anarchist mentality. Their duplicitous opposition to the SIR process is a case in point. When Congress lost in the Haryana assembly elections last year, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi held a much-publicised press conference, accusing the BJP of colluding with the Election Commission to indulge in “vote chori”.AdvertisementHe claimed that, according to his team’s findings, among a verified list of 20 million voters, 2.5 million were irregular entries that included duplicates, bulk voters and invalid addresses. He attributed his party’s defeat in Haryana to this alleged manipulation of the voters’ list. But when the Election Commission took the allegation seriously and undertook a nationwide exercise to rectify such anomalies through SIR, he and his party are on the streets protesting the same.Also Read | As a teacher, I was losing hope. Young protesters now give me hopeThe Commission clarified that out of the total 95.40 crore voters across the country, 13.39 crore were under review, among whom 6.30 crore had permanently shifted their residences, 3.01 crore could not be physically traced, 2.80 crore were dead, and 1.02 crore were duplicate entries. This clarification should have satisfied Rahul Gandhi. But he now makes exactly the opposite argument that the deletion of such voters in Bengal was “vote chori”. In Haryana, it was non-deletion that led to BJP’s victory, but a year later, it was the deletion that was the reason?Even that argument falls flat on data and facts. When one analyses the results of the West Bengal elections, it comes out that the five seats with the greatest number of deletions were all won by the TMC in the recent assembly elections, while seats with the least deletions went to the BJP. Similarly, the five seats with the voters added also went to the TMC and Congress, while those with the least additions were won by the BJP. The most interesting data point was about the deleted voters. Seat-wise analysis showed that even if all the 27 lakh deleted voters were added to their respective constituencies and all those votes were given to the TMC, the BJP would still be ahead in a majority of the seats.AdvertisementMany in the country point out that the Opposition’s campaign against the ECI is nothing but an effort to hide its inability to face the BJP through a genuine democratic process and an attempt to resort to anarchist tactics. A group of more than 40 former justices issued a statement decrying this vilification of constitutional institutions. Even a perceptive international observer like former Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić understood this anatomy of the anarchists. Praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi for elevating “India to the heavens”, Vucic said in an interview earlier this week that “you have a leader like Narendra Modi. And now there is an effort to undermine him… India became so important on the world stage because of him. Became a force. He has done tremendous things, yet they try to tear him down by claiming he failed or don’t know what.” He warned that “It has become a pattern.”you may likeFriedrich Nietzsche, the renowned German philosopher, once made a profound observation about anarchists. The obsession of an anarchist with ideals like “equality” and “justice” comes not from any noble virtue, but from his weakness and inability to deal with personal suffering. “When the anarchist, as the mouthpiece of the declining levels of society, insists on ‘right’, ‘justice’, ‘equal rights’ with such beautiful indignation, he is just acting under the pressure of his lack of culture, which cannot grasp why he really suffers, what he is poor in — in life,” he wrote in Twilight of the Idols. How appropriately it applies to the home-grown anarchists in our backyard.The writer is national vice-president, BJP and president, India Foundation