In its March 20, 2025 issue, The Economist lamented how “India is obsessed with giving its people unique IDs”. It mocked how various arms of the Indian state announce new unique IDs nearly ‘every month for everyone from doctors, teachers, athletes, judges, gig workers to even cows and buffaloes’.
The Economist got it half wrong. India is obsessed with IDs but not “unique” IDs. There is a profound and fundamental difference between the two. An ID can identify a person’s eligibility for a certain role or function or a group, such as an ID to drive or to vote or to perform surgery. A unique ID identifies the individual, regardless of their role or function. It certifies that the person is who he or she claims to be. India’s governance establishment often conflates and confuses between an “ID” and a “Unique ID”, with some disastrous consequences — as the Election Commission of India (ECI) did recently.
In March this year, the ECI announced that it was going to embark on an exercise to ‘link Voter ID with Aadhaar’. Voter ID (Electoral Photo Identity Card or EPIC) is an ID for the purposes of voting. Aadhaar is a Unique ID with no specific functional purpose. In simple terms, the ECI wants to convert its ID to a Unique ID.
The Maharashtra election as turning point
On September 18, 2008, under the leadership of then Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami, the ECI, in a letter to all the State Chief Electoral Officers, said that it was issuing an EPIC ‘for the purposes of correct identification of voters’ and that ‘every EPIC is unique’. Seventeen years later, in announcing a mission to link EPIC with Aadhaar, the ECI has implicitly admitted that its EPIC was only an ID and not unique, as it had previously claimed.
Evidently, the ECI has not understood the difference between an ID and a Unique ID or has misled Indians for nearly two decades. The Maharashtra State election, in November 2024, was a wake-up call for the ECI.
There were roughly 40 lakh new voters registered in Maharashtra in just five months between the 2024 general election in April and the Assembly election in November. But in the previous full five-year period between the 2019 Assembly election and the 2024 general election in Maharashtra, only 32 lakh new voters were added. Did Maharashtra experience a sudden population explosion in five months? Obviously, this is illogical and mysterious.
Contrary to what many, including this daily, claimed, it is not the absolute number of 40 lakh new voters by itself that is mysteriously large, but the fact that it defies common sense that more new voters can be added in five months than in the previous five years. As one would expect, never before in India’s seven-decade electoral history have more new voters been added in a few months than in previous five-year election cycles.
Expectedly, in similar past election cycles in all States, the number of new voters added in a few months was only a fraction of the total added in five-year periods.
It does not take Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the new voters enrolled in such large numbers in Maharashtra were either fake or duplicate. That is, the same person had many Voter IDs. This was seen in several constituencies, where thousands of voters with valid Voter IDs from another State were registered as new voters in Maharashtra.
Subsequently, in Bengal, it was pointed out that there were many voters with the same Voter ID number in multiple constituencies in Bengal as well as in other States. That is, one Voter ID number assigned to many people. So, neither was a Voter ID number unique to every voter nor was a voter unique to a Voter ID number. The ECI’s claim in 2008, that every Voter ID number is unique has been a plain lie, wittingly or otherwise.
There is a catch
Now jolted, the ECI seemingly wishes to fix this by linking the Voter ID with the Aadhaar. With its biometric process, the Aadhaar can ensure that one person cannot have multiple Voter IDs. This is a step in the right direction. But it is more complex than what the ECI makes it out to be.
To ensure that the same person is not duplicated, the Aadhaar numbers of all one billion registered voters have to be linked to their Voter ID. Having only some voters linked to Aadhaar will make the entire exercise futile, since then there is no guarantee of uniqueness and non-duplicacy. So, cleaning and de-duplicating voter lists with Aadhaar is an all or none exercise and cannot be half done. It implies that to be an Indian voter, an Aadhaar is a must. That is, Aadhaar will be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for voting in India. But by law, Aadhaar cannot be mandatory for anyone and is only optional. In short, India needs clean, de-duplicated voter lists. But de-duplication is only possible with 100% Aadhaar linkage. And Aadhaar is not mandatory. This is the conundrum that the ECI faces.
I venture to posit that Babasaheb Ambedkar would have taken a utilitarian approach to this dilemma and argued that the benefits of de-duplicated Voter IDs outweigh the costs of 100% Aadhaar linkage. He had warned in the Constituent Assembly in 1949 that the ‘sanctity of voter lists are the foundation of India’s democracy’.
Ensure a guarantee under oath
Further, Aadhaar can not only solve the ‘one person with many Voter IDs’ problem but also eliminate the issue of ‘one voter voting many times’. It is no secret that the archaic practice of inking a voter’s finger using an indelible ink after voting is bypassed using chemicals that can remove the ink. The benefits of Aadhaar linking to Voter IDs are significant and obvious.
But, as the saying goes, in a liberal society, it is fine for a hundred guilty people to go unpunished even if it means punishing even one innocent person. All of this can work out only under the absolute guarantee that no single eligible Indian citizen will ever be denied the right to vote. And this guarantee from the ECI has to be under oath — not like its ‘guarantee’, in 2008, of Unique IDs.
Praveen Chakravarty is Chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and Data Analytics for the Congress party
Published – April 08, 2025 12:16 am IST