Modi, Shah, and the art of the unanswered question
Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have mastered the victory lap. Examinations, hidden money and missing names are still waiting for the explanation that winning was supposed to make unnecessary.
The strongest challenge to Narendra Modi and Amit Shah is no longer whether they can win. It is whether a leadership that claims credit for national achievements will accept responsibility when institutions fail ordinary citizens. Youth protests over examination leaks and then over electoral rolls have exposed a political culture that treats electoral success as proof of good governance. India deserves more.
The partnership was forged in Gujarat. Modi was chief minister from 2001 to 2014. Amit Shah was a Gujarat minister from 2002 to 2010, including as minister of state for home, and became Union home minister in 2019. Precision matters: Shah took ministerial office after the 2002 Assembly election, not before the riots earlier that year. Their association connects the Gujarat experiment with national power. Concentrated leadership, a formidable party machine, Hindu nationalist mobilization, and development presented through a commanding leader traveled from Gandhinagar to Delhi. Federalism, Parliament, and the courts mean that more than the map has changed. Habits formed in one state now have national consequences.
Hindutva supplies the language of this politics. Supporters call it cultural confidence. The concern arises when minorities seem less entitled to a sense of belonging or to protection. Religious faith is not a party programme, and no mandate permits a government to treat minorities as less fully Indian. Reuters reported in April 2024 that Modi’s campaign linked Muslims with “infiltrators” and alleged that Congress would redistribute wealth to them. Congress denied it; the BJP called the remarks a criticism of opposition policy. Voters are still invited to judge fellow citizens as competing religious blocs. A prime minister owes some care for the fears he invokes.
The violence of 2002 remains part of any evaluation of Modi’s leadership, but moral criticism has to respect the judicial record. In 2022 the Supreme Court dismissed Zakia Jafri’s challenge to the Special Investigation Team’s findings, which had rejected a larger conspiracy involving Modi and others. Criminal responsibility has not been established. Citizens may still ask how the administration protected vulnerable communities, and how politics answered suffering. A judicial finding does not end the democratic argument.
Business and the state need the same distinction. Private enterprise can create work and public value. The objection is to access mattering more than competition. Not every industrialist is an oligarch, and not every sale is corrupt. The useful questions are how assets were valued, who could bid, and what can still be enforced. Claims of assets handed over at enormous public loss need valuations, tender terms, audits and named beneficiaries. Efficiency promised for later is not an account of value surrendered now.
Electoral bonds are the documented case. In February 2024 the Supreme Court struck the scheme down, holding that secrecy about political funding violated the right to information, and invalidated unlimited corporate contributions. The judgment did not find that every donation bought a favour. It found that citizens had been denied the information needed to look.
Economic policy has also to be judged by who pays. Demonetisation in November 2016 withdrew high-value notes from an economy that ran on cash. The Reserve Bank later reported that about 99.3 per cent of the invalidated currency returned. That does not dispose of every claimed benefit. It does undermine the idea that illicit cash would simply vanish. A daily-wage worker cannot defer food while a long-term objective is defended. A small firm cannot always survive the sudden loss of working capital. Reform is allowed. Suffering is not patriotism, and governments owe an account of alternatives and results.
The goods and services tax, introduced in July 2017 after years of Union-state discussion, was not these two leaders’ invention. A common indirect tax has a legitimate purpose. The GST Council’s own papers recorded worries about readiness and compliance. The question is whether smaller firms were helped to adapt, or handed costs they could least afford.
For the young, the argument arrives as an examination. Years of study and family money rest on the belief that effort will be judged fairly. On 25 July 2026, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned amid protests over the NEET scandal. The Cockroach Janta Party had made that resignation a central demand. The Indian Express reported that it was accepted, that Prahlad Joshi was given the Education portfolio, and that the movement then ended that phase of protest. A new minister is not a repaired system. The gain lasts only if papers are secured, responsibility is fixed, and candidates are put right in time.
The same protests have turned to the rolls. The Associated Press reported demands in Mumbai for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The Financial Times reported on 6 October that the nationwide revision had removed around 130 million names. The Commission said these were the dead, the duplicate and the relocated; critics alleged an exclusion that favoured the BJP. The report also noted that the opposition had not shown manipulation of results. A duplicate struck off is not a citizen denied the vote, and an official category does not prove that every name within it was rightly removed.
Bihar showed why the lists have to be open. In August 2025 the Supreme Court ordered publication of about 65 lakh names omitted from the draft roll, with reasons. A draft omission is not final disenfranchisement. On 27 May 2026 the Court upheld Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision: it has not held the exercise arbitrary or unconstitutional. On 5 October it said it had not approved changes to Form 6, and would look at responsibility once the Commission reported. Scrutiny is not a verdict. Citizens must be able to find, and challenge, decisions that affect their vote.
Form 6 is how an eligible citizen asks to be included. The Indian Express reported that the online form began asking applicants, or their ancestors, about earlier revision rolls, without a statutory amendment. Families with incomplete papers can be burdened by a condition the law does not impose. Software is not a way around statute. The paper also reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected to decisions taken without their knowledge. That dispute needs a documented answer from the Chief Election Commissioner: who authorised the change, and under what power.
The 2023 appointments Act prefers unanimity, and requires a majority where commissioners differ. Consensus is not compulsory. A decision imposed by the Chief Election Commissioner against both colleagues would break the majority rule. Whether that happened has to be read from the record, not inferred from an allegation.
Kumar’s appointment sharpens the doubt. In Anoop Baranwal, in March 2023, the Supreme Court prescribed a committee of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice, until Parliament legislated. Parliament replaced the Chief Justice with a Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The statute does not reserve that seat for the Home Minister. Amit Shah sat on it, with Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi. The President appointed Kumar in February 2025, over Gandhi’s objection to proceeding before the courts had examined the law. The executive thus holds two places on a committee of three. That is a real question about independence. It is not proof that the Commission is arranging a BJP victory. Partisan purpose has to be shown in conduct.
The state numbers show why procedure is the substance. The Indian Express reported 63,66,952 deletions from West Bengal’s revised roll, with about 60 lakh electors still under adjudication; further judicial scrutiny, it reported on 6 October, removed another 27.16 lakh. Deletion is not, by itself, wrongful exclusion. The failure of remedy is harder to explain away. More than a dozen tribunal judges flagged a portal that would not let them serve notices or restore deleted voters. An appeal that cannot be operated is not a right.
Goa was smaller, and plainer. Net deletions were 1.27 lakh, or 10.76 per cent of the earlier electorate. Ninety-seven people found eligible remained off February’s final roll because officials had no digital means of reversing the deletion. Many were later enrolled. The Commission ordered a special drive in 20 states and Union Territories where revision had ended. Restoration after the fact cannot return an election already missed.
None of this establishes that Modi or Shah ordered wrongful deletions, or that the Commission took their instructions. It does require an answer. Striking the dead, the duplicate and the ineligible is legitimate. Keeping eligible citizens off the roll by a closed procedure or broken software is a democratic failure. The Commission should publish deletion categories, the Form 6 decisions and any dissent, and the authority for every disputed requirement. It should give notice, a hearing and a correction before polling, by a route tribunal judges can actually use. Errors should be tested for disproportionate effect. Government must leave the Commission its autonomy; the Commission must show impartiality; the opposition should bring verifiable cases, not only a general charge. Parliament should revisit an appointment system dominated by the government under scrutiny.
From Gujarat to Delhi, Modi and Shah have been exceptionally good at getting power and keeping it. Victory is not a reason to treat scrutiny as disloyalty to India, and protest has to keep its facts rather than become another party’s instrument. Power has to be measured by whether citizens are protected, transactions can be examined, and institutions correct themselves. The young people asking for fair examinations and trustworthy rolls are making a basic democratic claim. Those who govern owe answers, including the inconvenient ones. Administrative convenience must never decide whose voice counts.
Besesayo Kezo, IPS
(Retd. DGP)
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