The grand Army parade on Delhi’s Kartavya Path earlier today symbolised the role of India’s sentinels in protecting our Republic. Yet a new danger to it arises not from its security vulnerabilities, but because of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) failure to dispel the growing doubts about the integrity of elections. A democratic Republic India cannot be with the sanctity of elections popularly perceived to have been violated.

The new danger to the Republic can be gleaned from the discrepancies in the results of the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections that were held simultaneously in Odisha, between May 13 and June 1, 2024.

Overcoming its shock at having been voted out of power after ruling Odisha for 24 years, the Biju Janata Dal, in December 2024, presented its analysis to the ECI, pointing to the anomalies in the results and requesting an explanation. Even after two more meetings, in June and August of 2025, the ECI hasn’t refuted or accepted the BJD’s contentions.

The party faulted the election process and the results on three counts. The first of these pertained to the discrepancies between Form 17C and Form 20 tallies. As is now widely known, Form 17C lists the number of votes polled in every polling booth. Form 20 provides the tally of votes counted from every booth. The figures in Form 17C and Form 20 of one booth should always match.

Discrepancies between counts

The BJD’s press note issued in December 2024 listed several discrepancies between the counts of Form 17C and Form 20. For instance, it said the difference was 682 votes in Booth No. 57 of the Phulbani Assembly constituency. In its complaint to the ECI, the BJD listed 58 booths spread over 147 Assembly constituencies in Odisha where the difference between votes cast and votes counted varied from one to 908.

I perused the data the BJD presented to the ECI, and found it more shocking than its press note suggested. For instance, the Form 17C of Booth No. 57 of Phulbani shows 682 votes were cast, but its Form 20 registers not a single vote as counted. This implies that not even one person voted at Phulbani’s Booth No. 57. Where did those 682 votes disappear? Not a single vote was recorded as counted for Talsara’s Booth No. 165 and Booth No. 219, where, according to their Form 17Cs, a total of 1,444 people had voted. As many as 627 of 777 voters registered at Kuchinda’s Booth No. 53 exercised their franchise. Yet its Form 20 shows not one of them did so.

Votes didn’t only disappear at the counting stage—they were mysteriously added, too. The Assembly constituency of Padampur was severely hit. Fourteen of its booths together polled just 82 votes, a figure arrived at after adding the number recorded in the Form 17C of each. Their Form 20s, however, show 9,304 votes were counted from those 14 booths. From where did the 9,222 excess votes come?

BJD leaders I spoke to admitted they didn’t have Form 17Cs of all of roughly 36,000 booths that were there in Odisha in 2024. The party’s booth agents either didn’t collect or failed to preserve them before its activists, demoralised by the defeat, belatedly decided to analyse the results.

No response through RTI

The BJD applied, therefore, to district authorities, under the Right to Information Act, asking for Form 17Cs of all booths in Odisha’s 21 Lok Sabha and 147 Assembly constituencies. Most of them didn’t even care to reply or rejected the applications outright. Only Form 17Cs of the Phulbani and Talsara Assembly constituencies were provided to the BJD.

Access to Form 17Cs of all booths would have enabled BJD analysts to crosscheck, and fathom, yet another peculiarity of the 2024 Odisha elections: a large number of people voted for Lok Sabha but not for Assembly elections—and vice versa. This is surprising, for not only were the two elections held on the same day, the booths for them were in the same hall as well.

In such a scenario, votes polled in a Lok Sabha constituency should approximate the total number of votes cast in its constituent Assemblies. After all, why would a person who took the pain to come to the polling booth choose to vote for either the Lok Sabha or Assembly elections? Perhaps the person, it can be argued, was unaware of the polling arrangement or thought one of the two elections was utterly unimportant for him or her. Such persons would likely number 100 or 200 at the most in a parliamentary constituency, particularly in Odisha, where simultaneous elections have been taking place since 2004.

Astonishingly, in only four parliamentary constituencies people not voting in both Lok Sabha and Assembly elections numbered less than 200, excluding those who exercised their franchise through postal ballots. This form of selective voting in the remaining 17 parliamentary constituencies ranged from 500 to over 4,000. In the Dhenkanal parliamentary constituency, 4,056 more people voted in the Assembly elections than in the Lok Sabha elections. It was reverse in the Kandamahal parliamentary constituency, where 3,521 more people voted to elect their Lok Sabha representative than their seven Assembly representatives.

In Odisha’s context, the Form 17C for every booth would have established where precisely the voter turnout was different for the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections held on the same day. It would have also quelled doubts regarding the unprecedented upward revision of the voter turnout, announced at 5 pm on the polling day, then updated at 11.45 pm, and refreshed again two days later.

The revision ranged from around 7 percent to over 17 percent in the State’s 21 parliamentary constituencies. In the State’s 147 Assembly seats, the jump varied from 8.54 percent to 30.64 percent, with the highest clocked in Keonjhar, from where the Chief Minister, Mohan Charan Majhi, won.

It can be argued that the increase should be measured from 11.45 pm, not 5 pm, although it is inconceivable that all of Odisha voted so late into the night. Once again, access to Form 17C, given after the voting is completed, would have scotched speculations regarding the voter turnout.

I asked two ECI officials whether replies were sent to the BJD. Neither responded. The ECI’s silence and inaction on the BJD’s complaints only deepen the doubts regarding India’s once-vaunted election process. Such doubts, if unchecked, could, in the manner of termites, hollow out the Republic.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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