Paris: This week's editorials on the conduct of Election Commission of India, the steady stream of reports on the chaos unleashed by special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and The Indian Express' landmark investigation into the inner workings of EC over the past year all point to the same conclusion: India's once most respected institution has dug itself into a deep hole.
The question now is how it will climb out of it. And how its shattered credibility can be rebuilt. Institutions take decades to build and moments to wreck. Rebuilding one that has lost the public is harder still. Bill Gray, a former Australian electoral commissioner, put it bluntly: losing trust is 'brutally simple and often fatal'.
