Institutional initiatives towards expanding democracy: the Election Commission of India and electoral mobilisation

Abstract

The Election Commission of India (henceforth, the EC), an institution created by the Constitution of India in 1950, manages and conducts parliamentary and state assembly (provincial level) elections. In recent elections, it has made tremendous efforts to make the electoral process more participatory. More than 900 million people were eligible to vote in the Indian parliamentary elections of 2019. In addition to the conventional ways of spreading voter awareness, the EC tried to reach out to voters through previously untried means to persuade them to come to the polling booths and vote–reflecting an institutional enthusiasm for popular mobilisation. However, there are also a significant number of missing names from the electoral rolls, and the EC faces accusations of being apathetic towards this anomaly. Is this eagerness on one hand and anomaly on the other symptomatic of ‘democracy at crossroads’, with India transiting to a more efficacious and involved institutional functioning, or is this an instance of strained institutional performance in the face of rising popular aspirations and tighter executive controls? The paper tries to explore this theme by looking at the functioning of the EC and its efforts towards voter participation in India.