00:00Let me play this interview that I did with Congress leader Shashi Tharoor over India
00:05bloc's petition in the Supreme Court and the protest.
00:07Listen in to this exclusive conversation.
00:19Joining me now is a senior Congress leader and Congress MP, Dr. Shashi Tharoor.
00:24Dr. Tharoor was on ground zero yesterday, along with all the party MPs and leaders of India bloc.
00:31Dr. Tharoor, the opposition first marched towards the election commission.
00:35Then we saw Jantar Mantar.
00:37Yesterday, the battle was taken straight to the Supreme Court.
00:40There has been street mobilization, a political confrontation and now a legal challenge.
00:46But how does the opposition sustain this movement beyond these demonstrations?
00:51Let me ask a more direct question.
00:53What would constitute a tangible victory, according to you?
00:58I think a tangible victory would be if we can actually help restore the voting rights of Indian citizens,
01:03which have been so cruelly snatched away by the malfeasance of the chief election commissioner.
01:08What we want to see is a number of specific things we have spelled out.
01:13They include a suspension of the current SIR process,
01:17a restoration of those who've been illegally deleted from the rolls back to the rolls,
01:21an opportunity to have the ridiculously intrusive software reviewed,
01:28because at the moment electoral officers, the EROs in the various states who have the authority
01:35are not even able to override the software to restore voters they know have been wrongly deleted.
01:40You saw the Indian Express investigation of the 97 cases in Goa.
01:44So you've got example after example of wrongdoing, the illegal changing of Form 6 and Form 7.
01:50As a former election commissioner rightly said, it looks like the ECI is at 6s and 7s.
01:55I mean, you've got one problem after the other that have been pointed out.
01:58But a lot of these have been put before the election commission and the bigger part before the Supreme Court
02:03in a series of election petitions.
02:06And I believe that many of these will be heard today, including the one that Rahul Gandhi filed yesterday.
02:11We also believe that in the interest of accountability, the chief election commissioner must resign.
02:16And all of these demands, I think, are going to be persisted with until justice is obtained.
02:21We believe that the integrity of the election process is fundamental to the health of Indian democracy
02:27and to the credibility of the largest democracy in the world, both nationally to voters and internationally to the rest
02:34of the world.
02:35So we cannot afford to let up on this effort.
02:38And there are multiple petitions, Dr. Tharoor, with regards to SIR.
02:43And all those battles with regards to SIR began around the time Bihar went to polls.
02:49There are several scrutiny which was done of the election commission at that time itself.
02:56The election commission has been arguing that electoral rolls must be cleaned, must be cleaned up
03:02to remove duplicate voters, those voters who have shifted and those who have died.
03:08Where do you draw the line between legitimate electoral housekeeping and potential disenfranchisement?
03:15What is the evidence that the SIR process has crossed that line?
03:19Well, look, nobody is against removing dead, absent or relocated voters.
03:24I mean, that's a common sense thing.
03:26And we have seen this done in the past.
03:28The problem is with the methods adopted by the election commission,
03:32the unseemly haste with which decisions have been made to strike voters off the rolls,
03:36the incredible slowness of the review process, the appeal process.
03:40You've seen, for example, in Bengal, you mentioned Bihar,
03:43but in Bengal, we had the outrageous exclusion of 94 lakh names.
03:47And as you know, some of them were legitimately people who had died or whatever.
03:51But there were many others who filed appeals.
03:53Some 34 lakh people filed appeals against their exclusion.
03:56And 91% of those appeals heard so far, which is only a fraction of the appeals.
04:02But 91% were found to have been unjustly struck off the rolls.
04:06Now, when you've made a mistake on such a gross scale that 91% turn out, you turn out to
04:12be in the wrong,
04:13on what basis can you put the onus on the poor voter?
04:15You are telling the voter, you prove that you deserve to vote.
04:19That's not the way our government used to work.
04:21That's not the way our system used to work.
04:22If there is grounds for suspecting that somebody is casting a vote in the name of a dead person
04:28or casting a duplicate vote or whatever,
04:31you bring forward your evidence as the election commission and invalidate his vote.
04:34You don't do this first and then ask them to prove it.
04:37We've had too many examples.
04:39For example, you've had people being struck for so-called logical discrepancies.
04:44Even poor, 94-year-old Amartya Sen has been asked to explain why his mother was only 15 years older
04:49than him.
04:50Well, sorry, that's how it was in those days.
04:52Marriages were very early.
04:53Children were born when mothers were 15 or 16.
04:55You can't suddenly call that a logical discrepancy in 2026 and start knocking people off the rolls.
05:01It makes no sense.
05:02We've had ambassadors who represent the country.
05:05Our foreign minister speaking for the UN gets a notice saying,
05:07why should he be allowed to vote?
05:08Well, he's just speaking at the UN on behalf of India.
05:11What's going on here?
05:12There is a preposterous illogicality to what the election commission has done.
05:20And you can't have a world record number of 130 million people struck off the rolls and expect to retain
05:26any credibility.
05:27What about all the elections that have taken place since 2002, which apparently is their magic yardstick,
05:33and 2026?
05:34Are we saying that Mr. Modi's elections were all invalid because apparently a lot of fake and dead people voted
05:40for him?
05:40What does this mean?
05:41You cannot jeopardize the credibility of the entire electoral system by saying if your grandfather wasn't on the rolls in
05:472002, you're a fake voter.
05:49There's something totally preposterous about the way they've gone about this exercise.
05:53So let me bring in what the BJP is saying here, Dr. Tharoor.
05:56They say that when the Congress or India bloc wins states, for example, the state of Karnataka or, you know,
06:05Kerala, even Tamil Nadu,
06:07you don't talk about exercise, SIR exercise and the voter deletion.
06:11You don't say that there is vote jory.
06:13You talk about it only when you lose elections.
06:16So you're not addressing the reasons why you're losing elections.
06:19You are looking at the election commission and trying to target him or the institution.
06:26I disagree fundamentally.
06:27We're talking about cases where people have protested the injustice.
06:30Have there been millions of appeals in Kerala of people saying they were wrongly struck off the rolls?
06:35No, because our parties are vigilant, not just the Congress party.
06:38Every party, including the communists and the BJP, are vigilant during the exercise.
06:42And if they saw any injustice being done, they would have taken it up.
06:44It so happens that in places like Bengal and Bihar, where the BJP and apparently their backers have an outsized
06:52interest,
06:53large numbers of Form 7s were filed to knock legitimate voters off the polls.
06:57Large numbers of Form 6 were changed and invalidated.
07:01Problems were created in those states where the BJP has a vested interest.
07:05I'm sorry.
07:05I don't want to make it so blunt.
07:07I, too, as an Indian, am proud of having a free and fair election system.
07:10And I will say to you, very frankly, where there were free and fair elections, no one is complaining because
07:16voters aren't complaining.
07:17Voters haven't come up and said we were taken off the rolls unfairly.
07:20Where they have, their appeals will be heard and they should be heard.
07:23But I think the fundamental flaw in the approach of the Election Commission is knocking people off first
07:28and then hearing appeals at a very sort of gentle pace, whereby it'll take 10 years for them to hear
07:35all the pending appeals for the decisions they've made.
07:37There'll be 10 years' worth of elections taking place where people won't be able to vote.
07:41And that's wrong.
07:42That is simply wrong.
07:43Absolutely.
07:43And it's a fundamental constitutional right of an Indian citizen to be able to make his or her own choices,
07:49to cast their own votes, to be able to determine their political destiny.
07:53The Election Commission has no business taking that away.
