The fourth branch is under strain

Independent institutions are not independent when their existence depends on executive control

Opposition parties have, once again, submitted a notice seeking a motion for the removal of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. The development carries the familiar weight of a foregone conclusion. The numbers in Parliament make failure certain. And yet the motion matters – not for what it will achieve, but for what it reveals.

This is the second such motion against Kumar. The first sought his removal after the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s conduct during the 2024 general elections drew sustained criticism, particularly over its handling of complaints against the ruling party and its opaque responses to questions about electoral rolls. That motion was rejected at the admission stage by the Rajya Sabha Chairman and the Lok Sabha Speaker.

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla was also the very official against whom the Opposition had filed a similar motion, citing his presiding over the systematic marginalisation of the Opposition by curtailing debate and converting Parliament into a chamber of ratification rather than deliberation. That motion was defeated.

Both officials sit at the heart of what legal scholars call the “fourth branch” of democracy – bodies outside the trinity of legislature, executive, and judiciary that serve as independent referees. India has built an impressive architecture of such institutions. The ECI oversees the world’s largest democratic exercise. Information Commissioners under the Right to Information Act are supposed to hold the State accountable to its citizens.

The CBI and the ED are charged with investigating powerful interests without fear or favour. The National Human Rights Commission, the CAG, and the Lokpal are all, in theory, guardians of the public interest.

But the distance between theory and practice is where democracy quietly erodes.

The allegations underlying both unsuccessful motions were credible. Against the Speaker: Opposition MPs have been suspended in record numbers, Question Hour has been curtailed, crucial legislation has been passed without debate, and the chair has intervened not as a neutral arbiter but as a partisan actor. Against the CEC: the ECI’s revision
of electoral rolls across multiple states has raised concerns about the exclusion of lakhs of legitimate voters. The ECI’s silence in the face of Model Code violations by senior leaders of the BJP, including the Prime Minister himself, has been conspicuous.

The reasonable expectation of enforcing the law has collapsed because of a structural problem the motions expose but cannot resolve. Both the CEC and the Lok Sabha Speaker owe their positions to the executive. The Lok Sabha elects the Speaker, meaning the ruling coalition installs its preferred candidate. The CEC, owing to recent legislative changes that removed the Chief Justice of India from the selection committee, is now chosen by a panel in which the government holds the decisive vote.

Motions to remove these officials require a majority in Parliament. But when brought by the Opposition, the outcome is predetermined.

The mirage of autonomy

The fourth branch cannot check the executive when the executive controls the conditions of its existence. The CBI and the ED have long been instruments of selective prosecution: the pattern of cases launched and dropped in alignment with political alliances has been documented exhaustively. The RTI regime is being throttled in slow motion. The institutional ecosystem of accountability has been hollowed out not through a single dramatic act but through accumulation: of appointments, procedural changes, and cultivated deference.

It is this accumulation that has contributed to multiple independent bodies reclassifying India from a “flawed democracy” to an “electoral autocracy”. The label is contested by the government, but the criteria underlying the classification are not arbitrary: they measure the independence of institutions, the fairness of electoral conditions, and the treatment of civil society and the press. On each dimension, the trajectory is downward.

Constitutional scholars have argued that this degradation is structural – that majoritarian governance tends to consume the independent institutions that constrain it, because those institutions represent the counter-majoritarian logic at the core of constitutional democracy. A government with a confident majority has every incentive to prefer compliant institutions over independent ones.

Democracies do not lose their accountability overnight. They lose it when its failure becomes predictable, and its pursuit becomes symbolic. The Opposition’s motions may have been destined to fail – but if that destiny goes unquestioned, then the deeper failure will belong to the idea that power in India can still be meaningfully checked at all.

(The writer is an assistant professor with the
Department of Professional Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.