By K Raveendran
Election regulation in India is trapped in a contradiction that has become harder to defend with each passing cycle. The Election Commission continues to apply old assumptions about influence, persuasion and voter exposure to a media and political environment that has been transformed by technology, scale and the permanent visibility of public life. The result is not merely inconsistency. It is a widening gap between the formal logic of election management and the lived reality of how campaigns now operate. That disconnect is visible in the treatment of opinion polls, in the selective understanding of what constitutes campaigning, and in the uneven application of restraint during staggered elections spread across states and phases.
At the heart of the problem is an outdated belief that influence can be controlled by banning a narrow set of activities while allowing larger and more pervasive forms of persuasion to continue unhindered. Opinion polls are restricted on the argument that they may shape voter behaviour. That concern is not entirely frivolous. Polls can create momentum, alter perceptions of viability and encourage tactical voting. Yet the Commission’s position becomes difficult to sustain when placed beside its tolerance for relentless public campaigning by incumbents who command massive visibility, state-like logistical reach and round-the-clock media attention. If the fear is that voters may be swayed, then it is hard to argue that a poll shown on a screen is inherently more potent than a prime minister or chief minister flying from rally to rally, dominating headlines and saturating broadcast and digital platforms with appeals for support.
This is where the Commission’s framework starts to look less like principled regulation and more like selective control. It treats influence as though it exists in discrete, measurable packets, some of which can be banned and others of which are too embedded in political practice to confront. But the modern campaign does not function in compartments. It is an ecosystem. Speeches, advertising, interviews, roadshows, digital clips, newspaper spreads, slogans, visual symbols and repeated television coverage all feed into the same machinery of persuasion. To isolate opinion polling as a uniquely dangerous instrument while treating high-voltage campaigning as a normal democratic exercise is to ignore how power actually circulates in the present age.
The contradiction becomes even sharper in staggered elections. India no longer votes in a single, insulated event. It votes in phases, across geographies, with different states and constituencies often operating under different campaign rules at the same time. This has made the old idea of a localised “silent period” increasingly porous. A constituency may technically enter a cooling-off phase, but voters there are not sealed off from the rest of the country. They are watching national television, scrolling through social media, reading newspapers, receiving forwarded videos and consuming a political spectacle that does not recognise state boundaries. If campaigning continues at full volume in another state, and that campaign is televised nationally, then the premise of silence becomes performative rather than real.
That is the central absurdity. The law or code may declare that canvassing must stop in one region to give voters time for reflection, but the voter remains plugged into a national information stream where speeches, accusations, promises and political theatre continue unabated. The distinction between direct and indirect campaigning has collapsed in practice. A rally held hundreds of kilometres away can reach a voter instantly through live feeds, clips and commentary. A leader’s speech delivered for one state can influence audiences in many others. The Commission’s rules appear to assume a world in which messages travel slowly, audiences are territorially contained and campaign exposure can be meaningfully switched off by administrative order. That world no longer exists.
The same inconsistency is visible in the treatment of advertisements during the cooling-off period. If canvassing for votes is disallowed, then newspaper advertisements carrying overt political messaging should logically fall under the same concern. Yet parties often continue to deploy full-page advertisements that are clearly intended to shape perceptions, reinforce narratives and remind voters of party symbols and leadership claims. These advertisements may be more polished, more targeted and more credible-looking than a routine speech. They enter homes under the cover of a newspaper’s authority and occupy visual space that cannot easily be ignored. To permit them while barring other forms of solicitation is to privilege one medium over another without a convincing democratic rationale.
This raises a deeper question about what exactly election regulation seeks to achieve. If the goal is fairness, then the current approach fails because it does not adequately reckon with asymmetries of money, office and visibility. Incumbents enjoy institutional prominence that challengers often cannot match. Their official roles generate news value automatically. Their public appearances, even when framed as governance, can blend seamlessly into campaign messaging. Their words are broadcast live and debated endlessly. Against this backdrop, selective restrictions on polls or last-mile canvassing do little to equalise the field. In some ways they may even reinforce inequality, because those with greater reach can continue to influence the electorate through forms of exposure that fall outside narrow definitions of prohibited conduct.
If the goal is voter autonomy, then the Commission must acknowledge that autonomy is not protected by symbolic silences that exist only on paper. Voters are not passive recipients who can be insulated from influence for 48 hours and then expected to decide in a purified mental space. Nor are they threatened only by formal campaign acts. They navigate a dense and continuous information environment in which politics arrives through entertainment, news, commentary, messaging apps, algorithmic feeds and ostensibly neutral reportage. A regulatory system that focuses on old-style canvassing while underestimating mediated mass influence is fighting the last war.
None of this means that all restrictions are futile. It means they need to be redesigned around present conditions rather than inherited assumptions. The Commission should move from medium-specific prohibitions to principle-based regulation that recognises functional equivalence. A televised rally, a front-page political advertisement, a sponsored digital blast and an opinion poll may differ in format, but each can shape voter perception. Rules should address their impact consistently rather than according to outdated hierarchies of respectability. Cooling-off periods, if retained, must be rethought in the context of national broadcasts and cross-border media spillovers. Paid political messaging in any form during such periods should face uniform scrutiny. Equally, official office-holders should not enjoy a practical exemption merely because their campaigning is wrapped in the aura of incumbency.
The credibility of election management depends not only on neutrality but on coherence. Citizens are more likely to respect restrictions when they see a clear moral and logical pattern behind them. What erodes trust is the spectacle of bans that appear strict in theory but porous in practice, and of rules that burden some forms of speech while accommodating others that are larger, louder and often more influential. The Commission’s challenge is no longer just to enforce order. It is to understand the communications age in which elections are now fought.
Democracy does require guardrails. But those guardrails must be grounded in how power, publicity and persuasion actually work. When regulation continues to operate on a 19th century understanding of communication in a 21st century campaign environment, it risks becoming both ineffective and unfair. The problem is not that the Election Commission is trying to restrain influence. The problem is that it is restraining influence selectively, inconsistently and according to a map of political communication that is long out of date. (IPA Service)
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