Late last year, a small Maharashtra village broke into the national imagination as its residents resolved to conduct a ‘mock repoll’ to verify the official vote count for their village of 2,000 voters in the 2024 assembly elections. To their eyes, untrained in seeing like the state, this was an act of deepening democracy, of contributing to the integrity of the electoral process, even of dispelling perhaps undeserved doubts over it. Naturally, then, Markadwadi voters approached the local officialdom to aid them in ensuring the accuracy of this simple exercise of citizenship. They lay claim to state machinery for the production of a people’s truth.The bizarre overreaction that followed – FIRs filed, curfew imposed, and prohibitory orders issued, reportedly at the instance of the Election Commission – was as unsurprising as it was illegal. The current central government has demonstrated a marked enthusiasm for dismantling knowledge-production apparatuses that may contest the truth produced by institutions within the regime’s networks of influence.This intolerance has extended to opposition-ruled state governments (such as in the long, drawn-out campaign against the caste census), to civil society organisations (such as the recent attack on CSDS), and to independent media (such as by issuing takedown orders through the so-called Sahyog portal). If such institutions, each enjoying a measure of protection, have not been spared, it is hardly surprising that the Markadwadi residents’ attempt to claim some say over the truth was swiftly shut down.The current regime much prefers to see its citizenry as sites of information – to be mined and manipulated by the regime’s trusted institutions as they produce claims about the ‘truth’ – than as makers of claims on knowledge or truths themselves.It is in the ability of the citizenry to subvert that dynamic that the promise of Markadwadi lies. In law, the villagers’ efforts were nothing more than just another exit poll. However, the fact that this poll was led by the people themselves – not this or that institution interpreting them – represents a radical threat to an insecure regime which disguises its fear of the people in the shoddy garb of populism.The upcoming assembly elections in Bihar are a tribute to that fear. The SIR exercise has been criticised as the single largest attempt to reverse the gains in effective universal suffrage made since independence; it has disenfranchised women, migrant workers, minorities, and the poor alike. Civil society and constitutional lawyers have done what they could to (to repurpose the Commission’s words) ‘purify’ the official electoral truth’.Under the scrutiny of high-profile litigation, and the Supreme Court’s orders, the Commission was compelled to re-expand the electoral roll. Even so, as per the best available data, the roll excludes nearly 10% of the estimated adult population (this figure was close to 0% in 2011), and the exclusions disproportionately affect the very marginalized populations which have historically been the likeliest to turn up to vote. The official claim about who ‘the people’ will vote into office has never been more tenuous.It is now incumbent on the people to reclaim the ground the state has ceded; doing this will require us to move from constitutional law in the Court to constitutional politics outside it. The Supreme Court, by directing a recalcitrant Commission to disclose details of the exclusions, has enabled just that. Thus far, this politics has taken the form of demonstrating SIR’s implications for the equity, fairness, and accuracy of the official electoral count.This is crucial. But we need to follow that up with a competing, people-led account of what the elections should have, and could have, been. Taking a leaf out of Markadwadi’s book, there must be efforts in the most affected constituencies to conduct polls and surveys, ones that count the ‘missing’ voter, and collaboratively produce an alternative story of an election that should have been but wasn’t. To allay any legitimate concerns about bias, the polls must be genuinely people-led and not allied with any specific political interests. They must invite the assistance and institutional backing (though not mediation) of civil society, all local parties including the ruling coalition, and other forms of political associations.If the Commission chooses to react the way it did in Markadwadi – that is, blatantly illegally – the fight may have to move back to courts again. But the Commission may do well to remember that, unlike in Markadwadi, these polls would not simply be a ‘repoll’ of the same electorate. Instead, they would be an independent survey giving voice to a wider group of citizens than the electoral process itself will, a survey necessitated by the undeserved exclusions from democracy inflicted by the Commission’s SIR.Having thus created a crisis of legitimacy for itself and Indian democracy, the Commission must not further hurt its credibility by suppressing perfectly legal attempts to produce alternative narratives to a skewed and undemocratic election. It must allow the demos to reclaim, even if only in this limited way, their democracy.Hrishika Jain is a constitutional lawyer, a law graduate from NLSIU and Yale, and currently a Fellow at the Melbourne Law School.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.