On January 19, 2026, voters in Deori municipality in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh participated in a referendum to choose between a khali kursi (vacant chair) and a bhari kursi (occupied chair), symbols representing the removal or continuation of the incumbent Chairperson of the Deori Municipal Council, Neha Alkesh Jain. In what turned out to be a close contest, 7,282 of the 13,367 votes favoured Jain’s continuation, while 6,085 sought her removal. The result amounted to a mid-term appraisal of her tenure.

The Deori referendum was an exercise of the right to recall (RTR) that voters of Madhya Pradesh have against elected representatives at the local level. The State introduced the RTR with legal amendments in 2000, empowering people to vote out civic body functionaries ahead of the end of their tenure. The provisions were put in abeyance in 2018 by the Kamal Nath government, which sought to give Councillors a greater say in electing and removing local body functionaries. The provisions were reactivated in 2025, with the Deori exercise being the first since then.

The Deori case offers an insight into how the provision operates on the ground. It has revived interest in the right to recall elected representatives and triggered debate over extending the RTR to MPs and MLAs, a proposal recently mooted by the AAP’s Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha.

During the zero hour in Rajya Sabha on February 11, Chadha said: “If voters in the country can hire leaders, they should also have the power to fire them.” He said that if an MP or an MLA did not meet the electorate’s expectations, forgetting their promises to the public and becoming distant and unresponsive, then voters can hold them accountable mid-term instead of having to wait until the next election.

Chadha referred to the RTR in force in other States’ civic bodies and also other countries, citing the mid-term recall in 2003 of the California Governor Gray Davis; Davis was succeeded by the Hollywood actor turned politician Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Madhya Pradesh introduced the RTR in 2000 by amending the Madhya Pradesh Municipal Corporation Act, 1956, and the Madhya Pradesh Municipalities Act, 1961, allowing the recall of Mayors, Municipal Chairpersons, and nagar panchayat presidents. Similar legal provisions were implemented in Chhattisgarh in 2007. Both States allow voters to recall municipal functionaries through direct vote in a secret ballot if the proposal for recall receives three-fourths of the elected council’s support.

States such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Haryana, Uttarakhand, and Himachal Pradesh also have provisions for the mid-term recall of panchayat and municipal functionaries. However, not all of them empower voters directly. Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Haryana, for instance, permit the RTR through a no-confidence motion passed by the majority of the council members alone.

Significantly, the proposal to extend the RTR to MPs and MLAs has met with strong resistance from the political class. Experts who agree on the need for greater accountability of elected representatives also recommend caution.

Currently, MPs and MLAs have a fixed term of five years that may be cut short only if a member is disqualified under the anti-defection law, occupies an office of profit, is declared to be of unsound mind by a competent court, or is convicted of an offence and imprisoned for two or more years.

The Constituent Assembly debated the issue on November 29, 1948, when an amendment by Lokanath Misra sought a provision for the RTR. He said: “...if we are the real members representing the people, our first concern should be the people. They must be our masters. If we serve them well, we can be there; if not, we must go out. But that is not how it happens now. Therefore, it is essential that people have the right to recall elected members. This is a fundamental right in democracy.” The proposal, however, was rejected by the Assembly.

In 1974, Jayaprakash Narayan pitched the RTR as part of the Sampoorna Kranti movement. That same year, C.K. Chandrappan introduced an amendment Bill proposing the RTR, which was supported by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. But the Bill was defeated.

In 2011, the activist Anna Hazare also demanded the RTR as part of the India Against Corruption movement.

In 2017, the RTR issue was again raised in Parliament when the then Lok Sabha BJP MP Varun Gandhi introduced a private member’s Bill seeking an amendment to the Representation of the People Act, 1951, empowering voters to recall MPs and MLAs. According to the Bill, any voter of a constituency who is not satisfied with the performance of their elected representative may file a recall petition signed by no less than one-fourth of the total number of electors in that constituency. The petition shall be deemed to be successful if signed by no less than three-fourths of the number of valid votes the member had polled during election. The safeguards proposed include not allowing any recall in the first two years of the term and restrictions on multiple recall petitions.

According to Afroz Alam, professor, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Chadha’s argument captures a genuine democratic frustration. “For many, the right to recall is morally appealing because it allows voters to remove non-performing MPs and MLAs mid-term,” he said.

However, the immediate reaction to Chadha’s speech is a clear indication of the strong opposition to the RTR among politicians cutting across parties at the State and national levels. Congress member in the Rajya Sabha and Deputy Leader of the Opposition Pramod Tiwari, for instance, rose to register his protest against Chadha’s idea: “I want to dissociate [myself] from this dangerous proposal. These thoughts are very dangerous and against democracy.”

The likely pitfalls

Experts too have voiced concerns about the effectiveness of the RTR. Former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) S.Y. Quraishi told Frontline that the right to recall legislators is highly impractical, fraught with the possibility of misuse, and would result in instability.

“Suppose an MLA won by securing one lakh votes and his closest rival got 80,000 votes, how many voters must sign a recall petition? What would the threshold be? Suppose it is 5,000. The losing candidate can then begin a campaign to recall the sitting legislator from day one. This will destabilise the system,” Quraishi said.

Quraishi was the CEC during the India Against Corruption movement in 2011 and recalled having explained the likely pitfalls to Hazare’s colleagues Shanti Bhushan, Prashant Bhushan, Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia, and Kiran Bedi, who had met him to propose a slew of electoral reforms, including the RTR. He had highlighted the difficulties in fixing the minimum percentage of voters required to sign the recall petition and in verifying the signatures, which would include ensuring that they were not made under coercion. He had flagged the huge scope for misuse and the instability it would result in.

Quraishi, who has dealt with the issue in his book An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election, said that with the RTR, legislators might resort to populist measures and desist from taking tough decisions, and in such a scenario, good governance will be the casualty.

“The frequent elections and imposition of the Model Code of Conduct will hamper development work,” he said.

Alam too said that the RTR could weaken governance if framed loosely around “non-performance”. “At the level of an MP or an MLA, performance is not always directly observable because legislative work, oversight, constituency representation, and negotiation cannot be reduced to simple delivery metrics. So yes, voters deserve stronger accountability from their representatives, but a poorly designed right to recall may turn into a ‘public mood’ button—fuelling permanent campaigning, discouraging difficult but necessary decisions, and replacing constitutional due process with political noise.”

Quraishi added that the experience with smaller scale RTR measures especially tells us that they may be motivated by political dynamics and rivalries rather than the unhappiness of people.

Recall referendum triggered by political strife

The Deori recall referendum is itself seen as having been triggered by political strife within the council rather than unpopularity among the voters. Jain and her husband, Alkesh Jain, were expelled from the BJP in November 2025 after corruption allegations were levelled against her. Other BJP Councillors had also turned against her and she had been accused of working at the behest of the Congress.

Between 2000 and 2018, 41 recall petitions were initiated in Madhya Pradesh, of which 20 resulted in the ousting of Municipal Chairpersons.

Alam said that the RTR provisions implemented in Madhya Pradesh, for example, show that a recall does not automatically mean instability because voters can choose to keep their representatives. But he cautioned that scaling it up to MPs and MLAs cannot simply be seen as an extension of the local level. “Higher-level representation is more complex: the constituencies are larger, party responsibility becomes intertwined with individual responsibility, and policy outcomes are often long-term and contested,” he said.

In other democracies too, Alam said, recall mechanisms are more common and workable at local and subnational levels where performance is easier to observe and attribute. “The California gubernatorial recall of 2003 illustrates both the feasibility and the complications of recall politics. It enables voters to remove an incumbent but it also contests legitimacy when a successor emerges from a fragmented field with only limited plurality,” he said.

Taiwan, for instance, shows that a recall can become a partisan instrument when used strategically to destabilise opponents or alter the legislative arithmetic rather than serving as a neutral device under citizens’ control.

Despite reservations on the implementation of the RTR at the level of MPs and MLAs, it is widely accepted that the unresponsiveness of elected representatives is a problem that needs to be solved. Quraishi said that an ideal solution is for all people to go out and vote. “Every five years, people get a chance to exercise their right to choose the right candidate and reject who has not worked for them,” he said.

Alam suggested that if India were to consider expanding the RTR to MPs and MLAs, it should proceed incrementally through rigorous and constitutionally mandated pilots, evidence-based evaluations, and specific standards rather than broad “non-performance” grounds that are difficult to define and easy to politicise. He said that adequate safeguards would also be required to ensure accountability and avoid risks of volatility.

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