Crux: What explains three BJP CMs suddenly entering the EC battle?

Bihar Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari have all stepped into the Election Commission controversy after The Indian Express reported repeated objections raised internally by two Election Commissioners . Why should three chief ministers suddenly feel compelled to defend the electoral process? What did The Indian Express report actually establish? The report showed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had repeatedly raised objections over issues including Form 6, ECINet, work allocation and the manner in which some decisions were being taken. But it did not establish that elections won by the BJP were rigged, that SIR was designed to make BJP win, or that Narendra Modi or BJP chief ministers were elected through a manipulated process. Then why are BJP chief ministers entering the fight? Opposition parties have been using questions around the EC, SIR and electoral rolls to cast doubt on the fairness of elections in which BJP governments came to power. For a BJP chief minister, therefore, staying silent means allowing the argument to move from “there were disagreements inside the EC” to “the election itself was suspect.” They are defending the process that produced their own mandate. So is the Election Commission only the immediate battlefield? If the Commission can be portrayed as compromised, the next argument becomes easier: elections conducted under it were compromised too. The real political prize is the credibility of BJP victories. But doesn’t the Indian Express report still raise genuine questions? Two Election Commissioners repeatedly putting objections on record is not something that can simply be wished away. Questions over internal procedure, ECINet, Form 6 and decision-making deserve answers on their own merit. But those institutional questions are different from saying they prove that BJP election victories were illegitimate. Where does Kerala complicate the Opposition argument? The same SIR framework was also used in Kerala before an election that Congress and its allies won. Congress leaders had not treated the process there as proof that the election itself was illegitimate. If SIR itself is evidence of manipulation when BJP wins, the obvious question is why the same process did not become evidence of manipulation when Congress won. So what are the three BJP chief ministers really defending? Their own political legitimacy. The Election Commission controversy has become the route through which recent BJP mandates are being questioned. The sharper question is not why BJP chief ministers are defending the EC. It is why they would allow a dispute inside the EC to be converted, unanswered, into an argument that the elections which brought them to power were themselves tainted.