The Bihar assembly elections have been announced, and now all eyes are glued to know the final result on November 14, when votes will be counted. The Bihar election is important for various reasons. This is the election in which the credibility of the Election Commission is at stake, and either way, a serious debate will ensue after the results are pronounced about whether votes were polled and counted with fairness or not and the result was not manipulated to suit the interest of a particular party.

The role of the Election Commission has never been discussed so much since the days when TN Seshan was the chief election commissioner, who should be credited for making the EC a powerful institution that refused to toe the government line. He embarked on a road which gave the EC ferocious teeth to bite big political parties, powerful prime ministers and chief ministers and cleansed the electoral system at a time when elections meant deaths and destruction at polling booths on a polling day.

Before the elections were announced, SIR had become the talk of the town, and the Opposition had alleged that the entire exercise was designed to help the ruling NDA by deleting and adding names of voters in the voters’ list to ensure the BJP/JDU’s victory. The SIR was challenged in the Supreme Court and, by court order, was forced to announce the reasons for the deletion of each of the 65 lakh names that........

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