India Wants The World To Fix Its Institutions While Fighting Over One Of Its Own

India's Leader of the Opposition climbed a police barricade on Parliament Street on Tuesday with the national flag in hand and got a hundred metres near the Election Commission but he could not reach it. What happened in those hundred metres and what is happening now will be read one way in Delhi and quite another abroad

Representational Image Via: INCIndia

Let us discuss the facts first. Opposition MPs gathered at Makar Dwar, a gate of India's Parliament House, and set off for Nirvachan Sadan, a walk of roughly a kilometre. Rahul Gandhi later said more than 300 members of both Houses had joined while some from the other side refuted the figure. Security personnel stopped them in front of the NITI Aayog building. Police said no permission had been given. Barricades went up, buses were already waiting when detentions began.

Among those taken away, reportedly, were Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Abhishek Banerjee and Derek O'Brien of the Trinamool Congress and the Congress general secretary K C Venugopal. Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi went into the Akashvani Bhavan compound, which sits between the barricade and the Commission and stayed there. Photographs showed them sitting under a tree. Youth Congress and NSUI workers followed them in solidarity.

They were still there in the evening. "We simply want to meet the Election Commissioners," Gandhi said. "Millions of people have voted for us so we simply want to ask questions." Later: if the police are uncomfortable with a protest here, they can give us another place, the Constitution allows us to protest.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge called the Commission a puppet in the hands of the government. The reply from the governing side was equally unambiguous. A BJP spokesman said the opposition was attempting to hijack Indian democracy through chaos. The BJP MP and former Union law minister Ravishankar Prasad said Rahul Gandhi was an agent of anarchy and pointed to the opposition's recent defeats — Bihar, Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi — as the real reason for the agitation. A deputy chief minister called it a systematic conspiracy to undermine institutions the public trusts. The opposition march from Parliament Street to the poll panel's office ended again in a police standoff. 

So far, so domestic. But do you know why it matters beyond India's borders? India is passing through the most difficult external stretch in some time and it is doing so while arguing with itself about who counts its votes.

Consider the past eighteen months for instance. Washington imposed tariffs on Indian goods that reached fifty per cent, half of that a penalty tied specifically to India's purchases of Russian oil. A framework agreed in February this year brought the rate down to some extent. The mechanism at play here is that our sovereign economic decision was made costly until it was reversed. That is how power is currently being exercised in the world.

India's foreign ministry has been naming this out loud and clear, time and again, on stages at home and abroad. Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly on 26 September, the external affairs minister S Jaishankar described what he called a weaponisation of everything, a mindset of extreme competition that undermines institutions and establishes chokepoints, running from finance to market access to supply chains to technology. He said the Global South faces a crisis of food, fuel, fertiliser and finance. He said the world is moving towards a multipolar order and that reform of multilateral institutions gets more urgent by the day.

This is the argument India has been making in every forum it can reach and it is bold. It says that the post-1945 architecture no longer reflects where power sits, that economic coercion has replaced diplomacy, and that the answer is not for every country to arm itself against every other but to rebuild institutions that people can trust, which is why this week is uncomfortable and why foreign correspondents are staring at the Parliament Street.

A country cannot easily argue abroad that institutions must be trusted and reformed while its own central institution is the subject of a street agitation. It is a genuine strategic problem and it belongs to the government and the opposition jointly because the credibility of the Election Commission is not a party asset. It is exactly the thing that makes every Indian government able to say abroad confidently that it speaks for 1.4 billion people.

Nor is the opposition's own house settled. On the same afternoon that its MPs sat under a tree in Akashvani Bhavan, a spokesman for one of its own allies was publicly attacking Rahul Gandhi over his silence on the same roll revision in Tamil Nadu, in language that was not remotely parliamentary. The Chief Election Commissioner can be removed only by a motion carried in both Houses by a majority of the total membership and two-thirds of those present and voting. The opposition does not have those numbers and will not have them before 2029. No march or dharna can magically change the numbers tomorrow morning. The only places where this can actually move are the courtroom, where the Commission must now produce its records.

Which brings to my mind the phrase one of the men sitting under that tree coined himself, during a long walk across the country not very long ago. He said he had come to open a shop of love in the market of hatred. Nafrat Ke Bazaar Mein Mohabbat Ki Dukaan.

It was a beautiful line with a good vibe in a very long time and the country could use it more now than it did in the winter of 2022. The demand for a clean electoral roll is legitimate and should not be softened by a single degree but a demand can be pressed hard without the temperature being raised this high because nothing remotely as complex as polls gets settled in a moment, without, of course, falling into total chaos. That should not become the endgame. Restoring Institutional Transparency and Voter Trust while being aware of India's place in a rapidly evolving world, that the global order is undergoing a churn and that the nations that lose sight in turbulent times stand to suffer a great deal. 

Institutions are repaired the way they are damaged. It is worth remembering how EAM Jaishankar chose to end India's National Statement at the United Nations. He pointed to the words carved on the lawn outside that building, Bapu's: there is no way to peace; peace is the way. Those words were quoted abroad, in India's name, about ten days ago and they apply to our national capital too today.