Election Commission Warns Kharge Over Modi

Why the ECI's 24-Hour Notice to Kharge Redraws India's Poll Rulebook

The Election Commission gave Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge 24 hours to explain his 'terrorist' jab at Modi. The speed — and the silence next door — is the story.

The Election Commission of India served Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge a 24-hour show-cause notice on April 22, 2026, hours after a three-minister Bharatiya Janata Party delegation led by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman walked into Nirvachan Sadan demanding "strictest action." The thesis is simple: the notice is less about what Kharge said than about what the Commission did not do to Prime Minister Narendra Modi three days earlier, and that asymmetry — codified in real time during a Bengal election the BJP would go on to win — is now the operative precedent for how India's poll umpire polices speech in the Modi era.

The remark itself was combustible but narrow. At a Bengal campaign rally on April 21, Kharge accused Modi of "terrorising" democratic institutions and opposition parties by misusing central agencies; the BJP condensed it into the single word "terrorist." Kharge, according to The Hindu, immediately clarified he meant the Prime Minister was "terrorising the democratic fabric of the country." That distinction did not survive the news cycle. Within 24 hours the ECI, citing "serious note," ordered him to respond in writing, NDTV reported, invoking the Model Code of Conduct.

The notice reads faster than the file it sits on

The velocity is the point. As The Wire noted, the action came "just hours after a high-level BJP delegation met the election commission" — while "the poll body has maintained silence on Modi's partisan national address broadcasted three days ago despite complaints." On April 18, days before Bengal's first polling phase, Modi used a national broadcast to blame the Congress, Trinamool Congress and DMK for the failure of the Women's Reservation Bill amendment. Congress filed a complaint alleging the address was a campaign speech dressed as an official broadcast. As of the day the Kharge notice went out, the ECI had issued no public response.

The two-track record was not new; it was becoming rule. During the 2024 general election, the BBC reported that after Modi's Rajasthan rally called Muslims "infiltrators" and "those who have many children," the Commission "declined to comment" on the substance and instead issued a notice to BJP president J.P. Nadda — not the Prime Minister. In parallel, the ECI acted swiftly against opposition leaders for smaller lapses. Former Chief Election Commissioner N. Gopalaswami had already warned, in the BBC's assessment of MCC enforcement, that the effectiveness of a censure "depends upon how much shame you have."

The document underneath: a code with no teeth

The Model Code of Conduct that anchors the Kharge notice is not statute. In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha released by the Press Information Bureau, the Ministry of Law confirmed the MCC "does not have a statutory backing" and "many of its provisions are not legally enforceable and hence not legally punishable." What the ECI does have is Article 324 of the Constitution — the residuary "plenary" power invoked, for example, in the 2020 order published by PIB that removed BJP ministers Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Singh from the star-campaigner list and imposed 72- and 96-hour campaign bans for "goli maaro" invective. That precedent is why the Kharge notice matters: the same Article 324 that can ground a campaign ban is what the Commission is now leveraging on a 24-hour clock against the leader of the opposition — while a sitting prime minister's rally speeches, over two election cycles, have drawn either delayed or delegated action.

The India Government portal on the MCC confirms that the code binds "political parties and candidates" equally and bars appeals on communal grounds and personal attacks unrelated to public conduct. In practice, enforcement is discretionary. That discretion is where the Kharge notice sits — and where its critics say the discretion has broken.

The Bengal context is not incidental

Kharge's remark, and the ECI's response, landed inside the most contested state election of the cycle. Nine million voters — 12% of West Bengal's 76 million-strong electorate — had been struck from the rolls in a Special Intensive Revision, Al Jazeera reported, with 2.7 million cases pending before special tribunals when polling began on April 23. The BBC reported that the Supreme Court declined to allow those voters to cast ballots while their appeals sat unheard.

That is the machinery Kharge was gesturing at when he used the word "terrorising." Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had already taken the ECI to the Supreme Court in February, alleging that the SIR "was selectively applied in West Bengal to benefit the BJP." When results were declared on May 4, the BBC recorded the BJP's "most significant breakthroughs" of the Modi era — a state it had never governed, taken with roughly 200 of 294 seats. Banerjee's response, as reported by Al Jazeera, was unambiguous: "The Election Commission is the BJP's commission."

The Kharge notice, in retrospect, was not a footnote to Bengal. It was the disciplining event that framed the closing week of that campaign — an official signal, days before polling, that the opposition's rhetoric would be treated as a violation while the government's would not.

What the notice buys the BJP — and what it costs the ECI

For the ruling party, the notice served two purposes at once. It flipped a defensive story — Modi's national address being called a campaign speech — into an offensive one, forcing Kharge, the 83-year-old Dalit face of the Congress, into a defensive clarification 48 hours before Bengal voted. It also weaponised the ECI's Model Code process itself as a campaign instrument. The Tribune noted the notice was framed as one about the "level of campaign discourse" — the exact language BJP delegations had brought that morning.

The cost is borne on the other side of the ledger. By August, the credibility question had metastasised. The BBC's assessment that "one of the most trusted public institutions in the world's largest democracy is facing a test of its credibility" traced the arc from the SIR, through the Kharge notice, to Rahul Gandhi's August 7 "vote chori" press conference alleging "100% proof" of systematic manipulation. Opposition leaders, briefly detained en route to ECI headquarters on August 11, publicly floated impeachment of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. They did not have the numbers. They did have the narrative.

The ECI's own August 17 press conference — a rarity — did not settle the matter. Kumar demanded Gandhi provide "an affidavit under oath" or apologise. Congress spokesman Pawan Khera, quoted by the BBC, said Kumar's "adversarial tone" made it seem "as if a BJP leader was speaking."

The structural change that made this possible

None of this is happening in a legal vacuum. In December 2023, Parliament changed the composition of the panel that selects Election Commissioners: the Chief Justice of India was replaced by a minister chosen by the Prime Minister. As Delhi University professor Apoorvanand argued in Al Jazeera, "that is how the ECI lost its independence" — an institution now "issuing notices to the opposition leaders for small lapses and taking no action on grave violations." That is a partisan reading. But the structural fact — that the executive now dominates the appointment panel — is on the statute book, and it is the fact that makes the Kharge episode legible as a pattern rather than a mishap.

The Observer Research Foundation, in a 2019 analysis that has aged into prophecy, warned that "the MCC, without a stringent legal cover, is impractical and toothless." The Kharge notice suggests the opposite risk: a code with no legal teeth can still be an effective political instrument when the umpire chooses when to blow the whistle.

Diplomat View

The Kharge notice will be remembered less as a rebuke of an opposition leader than as the moment the Election Commission's discretion — the space between what it must do and what it chooses to — closed decisively in one direction. Our call: the ECI's next high-profile speech-code notice, before any 2027 state cycle, will again land on an opposition figure within 24 to 48 hours of a BJP complaint, while comparable BJP speech complaints will sit unresolved past polling day. What would falsify this: a public censure — not a private notice, a public one — issued against Modi, Amit Shah or a sitting BJP chief minister for a campaign-period speech before voting closes. Absent that, the working assumption in New Delhi is that Article 324 has been quietly re-tuned into an asymmetric instrument, and the opposition will run its 2027 campaigns accordingly — through the courts and the press, not through the Commission.

What to watch next

• Kharge's written reply and whether the ECI escalates to a campaign restriction under Article 324, or lets the notice die quietly now that Bengal is decided.
• The Supreme Court's pending disposal of the SIR challenges filed by Banerjee and the Association for Democratic Reforms — the only forum with the authority to force the ECI's hand.
• The impeachment arithmetic on CEC Gyanesh Kumar when Parliament next convenes: the opposition lacked numbers in August 2026, but the motion itself, once filed, becomes the vehicle for a longer-run legitimacy fight the BJP would prefer not to have on the record.