What Gandhi’s Voter Owes India, and What India Owes the Voter

FOR GANDHI, voting was a duty before it was a privilege, an act of public judgment that a citizen owed to the country and could not surrender to friendship or faction. In ‘What Should the Voters Do?’, published in Navajivan on May 16, 1920, he set out how he would judge the candidates if he were to cast a vote himself. Gandhi wrote this at a time when the legislative councils created by the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were about to face their first electorate. Having watched multiple municipal elections where electors let private relations with candidates outweigh qualifications, he began the essay with the voter’s own conduct. 

In his piece, Gandhi urged that voters should not “identify themselves with any party or its quarrels” and that “their character should weigh more even than their views.” Notably, he went on to propose four questions to put to any candidate: whether he would favour heavy duties on foreign cloth, whether he would conduct provincial business in the vernacular and national business in Hindustani, whether he would work to redraw provinces on linguistic lines, given that the existing division had been made by the British “for administrative and political purposes” and not for the people’s wishes, and finally, whether he held that there was “not the remotest likelihood of India’s regeneration without Hindu-Muslim unity,” and, that the candidate would help the electorate “in all legitimate ways in their trouble” irrespective of religion. Gandhi himself said the list was not fixed, writing that “it is not the particular questions that matter,” because what he wanted was an electorate that knew where candidates stood on national questions and could therefore be “impartial, independent and intelligent.”

The most striking passage in the article, however, concerns the voter who finds no candidate worth voting for, and here Gandhi, instead of asking the voter to settle for the least bad option, says, “abstention amounts to an exercise of one’s vote.” He anticipated the objection that good voters staying home would hand the seat to bad candidates but argued that a drunkard elected by other drunkards still could not sway the Council with his views or speeches, and that voters who had stayed away would learn from the experience and look harder for a good candidate next time. The whole argument, however, rests on the premise that the voter is on the roll, free to vote and equally free to refuse. The Election Commission of India’s (‘ECI’) Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) has toppled that very premise upside down.

Gandhi’s voter today faces the burden of proof

What began in Bihar in 2025 has since become a national undertaking and has extended in its second phase to twelve states and Union territories, and carried into places as different as Delhi, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Goa. The question of who belongs on the roll is now being asked of crores of voters across the country at once. While the Commission presents it as a routine exercise in keeping the rolls accurate under the garb of a legitimate aim, it makes the voter bear the cost of cleaning them as it puts the burden of proof on the electorate. The exercise has evoked widespread criticism, retaliation and condemnation from various parts of the society including activists, civil society and concerned citizens.

On May 27, 2026 the Supreme Court, which for months continued to hear a challenge to the legality of the exercise, upheld it. In its judgement, it found it consistent with the Representation of the People Act and within the Commission’s statutory mandate. The Court noted that the Commission has the power to order a special revision and that an accurate roll is a legitimate aim. It weighed the burden on the voter, because the Court deferred to the Commission on method, stating that it could not decide whether the method was the most optimal, and it took this misplaced standard of deference from its demonetisation ruling over economic policy on a constitutional right. 

In it, the Court admitted that the revision as first designed raised “legitimate concerns regarding documentation, transparency, and access,” and it accepted that the burden of claims and appeals could fall hardest on migrant workers, rural populations and the poor, and then it rested its confidence on the remedies of claim, objection and appeal, as though a door that opens late were the same as a door that was never shut. 

In West Bengal, for example, the Commission placed most deletions under “logical discrepancy,” a category created for the state alone, under which mismatched spellings of a name, one person being linked as parent to more than six voters, or a gap of under 40 years between voter and grandparent could each flag a name. The Supreme Court noticed this on April 13, 2026, when Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that “no other State has a category called logical discrepancy,” yet the bench declined interim relief and sent petitioners to the appellate tribunals, as lakhs of appeals went pending before 19 tribunals.

West Bengal voted this year on a roll from which lakhs of names had been removed, while the tribunals meant to hear their appeals had begun sitting only three weeks before the first phase. Kolkata-based Researchers from SABAR Institute found no constituency in West Bengal where the Muslim share of logical-discrepancy cases was lower than the Muslim share of voters. 

It is when one asks who was deleted that Gandhi’s concern with the unity of Hindus and Muslims enters the picture. For in Metiabruz, where Muslims are about 60 percent of the population, 87 percent of those excluded under the logical discrepancy criteria were Muslim. While the Commission continues to call allegations of mass disenfranchisement in Bengal highly exaggerated, even so, a roll that thins unevenly along community lines puts Gandhi’s fourth test to the political system in a form he could not have anticipated. Gandhi, therefore, becomes all the more relevant when one asks whether the commitment to Hindu-Muslim unity is being honoured in the way elections are conducted and not only in what candidates say.

Gandhi’s voter was presumed to be on the roll and was asked only to judge, whereas the voter today must first prove that they belong there. The Indian Express recent report, widely read and circulated, reported inter alia that both the Election Commissioners challenged the “unauthorised, illegal” changes to Form 6 for new voter registration. The changes to the form asked new applicants whether they, or a parent or grandparent, appeared in the previous revision’s roll, which has made a person’s eligibility depend on their ancestors’ paperwork. The difficulty is that such records are exactly what poor, migrant and minority families are least likely to hold in clean form, and a spelling mismatch is enough to put a name in doubt. Even Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu was reportedly served a notice during the Delhi revision because his entry did not match an earlier record. A voter who must prove they belong is treated as a suspect until cleared.

This becomes of more concern in today’s political atmosphere where hate speech and majoritarian appeals ask for the vote by teaching one part of the electorate to fear another. Whether such speech and the uneven thinning of a roll are connected is not difficult to infer. It is a fair reading that a Hindu-Muslim binary is useful at election time, because it sorts voters into camps and converts division into seats. That is the opposite of what Gandhi asked of his candidates, since for him unity was a condition of India’s regeneration and not a means of winning an election. And so, we must remember Gandhi who made the candidate answer for unity before asking for a vote.

Gandhi wanted an electorate that was “impartial, independent and intelligent,” and the Commission holds the roll on which that electorate stands. And so, the duty he placed on the voter also has a counterpart in those who are entrusted with the task of drawing up the list. Gandhi read the vote as a duty before it was a privilege, but when a voter must first prove their place on the roll, through an arduous and painstaking process, casting a vote begins to look less like a duty any citizen can perform and more like a privilege that must be earned.