On 15 August, India celebrated 78 years of independence from colonial rule. The tricolour fluttered across villages and cities as a testament to the centuries of struggle for freedom. But beneath the surface of this remembrance lay a profound anxiety: that the most basic right won through that struggle — the right to vote, the equal voice of every citizen in the affairs of the republic — was being stolen in plain sight.

Just a week before India’s Independence Day, Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition, released a bombshell investigation that has shaken Indian democracy to its core. At a press conference in New Delhi on August 7, Gandhi unveiled data from Mahadevapura, Karnataka — a constituency won by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2024 general election. Unprecedented in both precision and scale, over 100,000 votes are in question.

The cited figures are so stark they read like fiction: 40,009 invalid addresses, over 10,000 bulk registrations at single addresses, duplications, and thousands of nonsensical names. A single building in Bengaluru supposedly hosted eighty voters, none of whom the neighbours could identify. Television anchors flocked to the presented addresses to find the same. Ordinary citizens logged onto the Election Commission’s website in the thousands to download the data — finding record after record of one individual with multiple ‘EPIC’ numbers or unique voter identity numbers. The evidence, in short, was available at all fingertips.

The response was immediate and fierce. The Election Commission dismissed the charges as “misleading and baseless.” Ministers of the ruling government denounced Gandhi’s allegations as an attack on the nation. Yet opposition leaders across the INDIA (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance) bloc rallied to his side. Inside the Parliament and on the streets, they demanded a forensic inquiry and the publication of the full voter roll data. In response, tens of members of parliament were arrested.

India’s democracy will be put to the test once more — in the upcoming state-level elections in Bihar, its second most populous state. This week, Gandhi has launched the Voter Adhikar Yatra on August 17 in Sasaram, Bihar — his rallying cry framed as a “fight to protect one person, one vote.” He accused the Election Commission (EC) of colluding with the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) to manipulate voter rolls under the guise of the “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) He claimed that in Bihar alone, 65 lakh voters had been removed, while in Maharashtra, 1 crore new voters were added, and in Karnataka, over one lakh votes were manipulated.

This right to vote was never handed down easily; it was won, demanded, wrested from colonial rulers who believed ordinary Indians were unfit to govern themselves. At the moment of independence, many argued that a poor, illiterate population could not possibly sustain universal suffrage.

But the Constituent Assembly, led by B.R. Ambedkar, stood firm: every adult, man or woman, rich or poor, upper caste or Dalit, would have an equal say. The first general election of 1951–52 was a miracle of organisation and imagination. Ambedkar said, “Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards our fellow men.”

The allegations of voter roll manipulation are not simply about clerical errors or technical glitches. They speak to a deeper pattern: the attempt by a ruling regime to hollow out democracy while maintaining its shell, to impose a new form of authoritarianism that wears the mask of popular legitimacy. To do so is to betray not only the promise made at the eve of independence, but also the struggles that came before it — the peasants and workers who fought for sovereignty, not just from the Empire, but from hunger, exploitation, and disenfranchisement.

But today, as millions find their names missing from the rolls, that promise rings hollow. One cannot help but recall the words of poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who, at the moment of independence, wrote in anguish at the subcontinent’s devastating partition:

“Yeh daagh daagh ujala, yeh shab-gazida seher — Woh intezaar tha jiska, yeh woh seher to nahin.” “This stained light, this night-bitten dawn — This is not the dawn we had awaited.”

Faiz’s words resound today in an India where democracy too seems partitioned — between those whose votes count, and those whose names vanish.

Seventy-eight years on, independence is not a memory but a mandate. Independence Day reminds us not only of liberation from colonial rule, but of the long, unfinished battle to secure real freedom: freedom from want, freedom from fear, and freedom to decide our destiny. If the vote is stolen — whether through intimidation, communal hatred, or manipulation of the electoral rolls — then the republic itself becomes a shell, emptied of its substance.

The dawn awaited has not yet come.

To resist this theft is therefore to continue the liberation struggle in our time. On 15 August 1947, India lit a torch that inspired colonised peoples everywhere: that freedom was possible, that empires could be broken, that ordinary people could govern themselves. Today, that torch flickers in the wind of authoritarianism. To shield it, to strengthen it, to pass it on — that is the task of this generation.

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