Agents of chaos trying regime change in India

Unable to defeat the BJP through successive electoral contests, sections of the opposition and the organised Left have chosen to delegitimise the process itself.

In a functioning democracy, the right to protest is fundamental. It is also not absolute. The moment a protest deliberately breaches the fundamental rights of others, through sustained disruption of public order, engineered institutional collapse, or campaigns of disinformation that seek to delegitimise the electoral process itself, it ceases to be a democratic exercise and becomes something else entirely.

What unfolded in Delhi in October 2026 was the latter. A narrow, technical exercise of cleaning electoral rolls was inflated into a national crisis of “vote chori,” complete with street mobilisation, red salutes to foreign uprisings, and open talk of regime change. This was not spontaneous anger. It was the playbook of agents of chaos.

THE SIR HYPOCRISY

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No serious observer claims the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is flawless. Procedural shortcomings have been real. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen highlighted the rushed timeline in West Bengal, inadequate opportunity for voters to produce documents, and the absurdity of “logical discrepancies” that flagged him over the recorded age gap with his deceased mother despite both names already existing in official records. In Bihar, the first state to undergo the exercise, draft deletions ran into the tens of lakhs. Independent analyses later flagged remaining duplicates, gibberish entries, and questions over how many living, resident voters were wrongly marked “shifted” or “dead.” Similar concerns about haste, software flags for family relationships and spelling variants, and the practical difficulty faced by migrants and the poor have been raised in Maharashtra and elsewhere. These are legitimate questions of process and remedy.

However, they should not be viewed as any evidence of a grand conspiracy to steal elections. For more than a decade after 2014, large sections of the opposition and their allied activists routinely alleged that the government retained dead and duplicate voters to engineer outcomes. When the Election Commission finally undertook a systematic clean-up, removing precisely those categories of names, the same voices reversed course and declared the clean-up itself to be theft. This is not principle but political opportunism and must be recognised as so. The Indian electorate, across multiple state and national contests, have repeatedly rejected the broader “vote chori” narrative. Treating every administrative shortcoming as proof of systemic rigging tests the intelligence of ordinary citizens and insults the institutions that have delivered successive peaceful transfers of power.