System can’t be honest only when you win: 124 ex-officers support ECI, SIR

A total of 124 former IAS, IFS, IPS and allied services officers have strongly defended the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the SIR process, saying a system cannot be honest when someone wins and rigged when that person loses.

In an open letter to the citizens of India, the former officers also said institutions cannot be judged on the touchstone of political affiliation.

They said under the same commission, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)at the Centre lost Assembly polls in Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir, and in 2024, lost its majority in the Lok Sabha.

“The winners raised no complaint. A system cannot be honest when you win and rigged when you lose,” they said.

The officers, including former secretaries to the Government of India, former ambassadors, former directors general of police, former chief secretaries of states and former directors general of income tax, also said errors must be corrected, but the legitimacy of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll is settled.

They said the SIR is a cleanup operation that sanitises voter lists and weeds out ineligible voters, bringing some discomfort in the process, which is part of every major initiative to improve the health of India’s democracy.

The signatories to the letter included former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal, former Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officers RD Kapur, Samirendra Chatterjee, Gopal Krishna, Vivek Bhardwaj and Navneet Sehgal, former Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officers Bhaswati Mukherjee and Prabhu Dayal, and former Indian Police Service (IPS) officers K Aravinda Rao and Sarvesh Chandra.

Highlighting India’s transformation from an era of booth capturing, ballot-box stuffing and electoral violence, the officers said today’s electoral system has multiple layers of checks and safeguards, including polling agents, EVM sealing, strong-room security and VVPAT verification.

They cited last year’s Bihar Assembly polls, which recorded no re-polling and the highest voter turnout since 1951.

Strongly defending the ECI’s independence, the officers highlighted its multi-member structure and institutional safeguards.

“Questioning is every citizen’s right. Proving is the accuser’s duty,” they asserted.

On the SIR, the officers said the exercise is essential to clean up the electoral roll. They highlighted the identification of around 22 lakh deceased voters and seven lakh duplicate entries in Bihar, alongside the addition of approximately 21.5 lakh new voters. “An uncleaned roll does not protect the voter. It protects fraudster,” they said.

The officers also highlighted the safeguards available under the SIR, including notices, hearings, appeals and the participation of political parties’ booth-level agents.

They pointed out that the Supreme Court has scrutinised the exercise, prescribed additional safeguards and, according to the letter, upheld the ECI’s authority to undertake it.

In a pointed message to those questioning poll results, the officers said, “If the system you call rigged is the same one that handed you your victories, ask yourself whether it is the system you doubt, or only the result.”

The officers said they have prepared voter lists, trained polling parties, sealed strong rooms and supervised the counting of votes.

“We belong to no party. We write because one word, ‘rigged’, is now thrown at our elections without evidence, and every repetition wounds democratic trust that belongs to all of us,” their letter said.

The officers said booth capturing was so common earlier that Parliament made it a crime in 1989, and when violence speaks, democracy falls silent.

“Every candidate’s agent watches every booth and takes home a signed count of the votes cast. Machines are sealed with the agents’ signatures and guarded in strongrooms that candidates may watch,” they said.

They added that paper slips are matched with machine counts, a safeguard the apex court upheld in 2024, and pointed out that rigging would need the silence of tens of thousands of officials from Governments of every political colour, and of the losing parties’ own agents.

No such conspiracy has ever been proved. The same logic governs the top. The Election Commission was made a multi-member body, a design the Supreme Court upheld in 1995, so that no one person holds such power.

“Three Commissioners weigh every question from different angles and that is not something unforeseen,” they said.

The former officers asserted that the SIR is not a weapon for exclusion.

“The draft roll is provisional, and absence from it is not deletion. No name is removed without notice and a hearing. Two levels of appeal follow. Every party may post agents beside every Booth Level Officer,” their letter said.

The officers said democracies are worn away by those who create loud political narratives to incite volatile sections of citizens without sufficient proven evidence that their vote was never counted or their vote does not matter.

“That is clearly an attempt to find relevance after being discarded by people through the electoral system,” they said.