As you read this, the results of the latest Assembly elections are already old hat. And there has been the predictable flood of analysis. It is astonishing that, but for a few excellent exceptions, most narratives are being written or relayed across media platforms as if these elections were held in a pristine vacuum. The National Democratic Alliance’s (NDA) handsome victories in Assam, Bengal, and Puducherry, its reduced seats in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, the DMK’s shock defeat in Tamil Nadu—these are not and should not be the prism through which India discusses these elections.

There is only one lens through which any election in any democracy can be viewed, analysed, adjudged: how democratic and honest was the electoral process, how impartial was the election commission, how universally was franchise exercised. That is the only true measure of a full and functioning democracy, and that shows that all the elections held in the recent past are seriously damaged. Without acknowledging this and without recognising the Catch-22 situation in which the opposition is caught—damned if you participate, damned if you don’t—we can crunch numbers till the cows come home (as indeed they will) and still fall far short of the real story.

Various disingenuous posts and articles are doing the rounds asking readers to focus on corruption, rapes, unemployment, infrastructure, and so on, and not to obsess with an SIR process here or a delimitation exercise there. The idea is to suggest that these factors, and not communal gerrymandering or bulk deletions of names, are the real reasons for the sweeping victories in Assam or West Bengal. This gloss is important; even governments with totalitarian ambitions like to flaunt the fig leaf of democracy. But Indians cannot afford to be blinded by the gloss; they need to question it. In a sharp piece written for Scroll, the journalist Anant Gupta has done exactly that. He has found that in half the seats the BJP won in Bengal, the total SIR deletions are more than the victory margin, and the bulk of these seats are those the BJP has never won before.

It would be useful at this point to recall how another anti-incumbency wave, against the BJP in Haryana in 2024, mysteriously did not bring about a change in mandate. In fact, the BJP polled its best-ever numbers (48 of 90 seats) even as its own supporters were pointing to rampant misrule. The Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, subsequently raised charges of electoral manipulation in Haryana, but they went unheeded by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Allegations have since been regularly made about duplicate entries, mass deletions by the fraudulent use of Form 7, bulk registrations and, most recently, the indiscriminate vacuum-cleaning exercise by which voters were simply whooshed away by the SIR. These are serious charges in a democracy, but they have not been given due credence by the ECI or the Supreme Court.

Electoral malpractice is an enormous breach of the law and the Constitution, but the ECI’s bias has been nakedly apparent even in other infractions, such as the rampant hate speeches made by Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, the repeated invoking of religion in election campaigns, or the Prime Minister delivering an election speech disguised as an address to the nation, all of which the ECI has regularly ignored. Any election analysis, therefore, becomes compromised unless the ECI’s role is examined and challenged, and the judiciary’s role questioned.

The highest court’s casual dismissal of a plea about names missing from the voter’s list by saying it is all right for citizens not to vote in one election was breathtaking in its disregard for citizen rights and constitutional principles. In Assam, similarly, one cannot study the election and Sarma’s victory while overlooking the highly polarised atmosphere of hate and fear that he has created there, as well as the starkly communal delimitation exercise that was carried out in 2023. Existential issues such as delimitation or SIR are in play now, institutions have been compromised, and one can no longer focus on the result alone as if it were an end in itself.

Elections are held every five years to give people a chance to change their government if they choose to do so. A groundswell of discontent was growing against Mamata Banerjee’s failure to rein in the violence and corruption of her party workers, initiate strong economic growth, or create jobs. This was bound to show up in the election results. Similarly, the inability of the Left or the Congress to articulate a strong alternative ideology to counter Hindutva can well fail to enamour voters. But their or the Trinamool’s defeat should come about through a strictly fair and transparent electoral process. The muddying of the process has tainted not just all recent elections but also the string of NDA victories. This is not a technical quibble; it goes to the very heart of why fixating on voter turnout or Amit Shah’s exertions is inadequate and indeed risks legitimising the glaring defects in the process.

The elections in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where the saffron party has a low 11 per cent and 3 per cent vote share, respectively, were relatively less impacted by SIR anomalies. Anti-incumbency claimed both these governments, largely expected in Kerala but far less so in Tamil Nadu. Both States have development indices higher than the national average, and the quality of voter discontent was of a different order. If Kerala was disenchanted with what was seen as Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s growing arrogance and carelessness about corruption, Tamil Nadu’s verdict appears to have been largely driven by young people and women who believe cinema hero Vijay will vanquish problems in real life as he does on screen. One result driven by practical considerations, the other by emotional ones, but both willed by the people.

Frontline, which has an esteemed history as a magazine of record, carries in this issue reports on all five elections, with our reporters analysing both the numbers and the realities behind the numbers. But let us also set on record that until the ECI returns full transparency and impartiality to elections, any election analysis feels like a mock drill.