Is India's Election Commission still truly independent? Two developments happened sometime back. The first is the most basic one of all: who gets to choose the people who run our elections? For decades, the government chose them alone. In 2023, the Supreme Court said they should be picked by a neutral panel, the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Chief Justice of India, to build independence into the process, but only until Parliament made its own law. And when it did, it replaced the Chief Justice with a minister chosen by the Prime Minister, giving the government two votes on a three-member panel.