INDIA Bloc MPs Gear Up for Another Protest Against CEC on October 8
The whole CEC row is heating up again, and the INDIA bloc isn’t letting it cool down for a second. After the big drama on Parliament Street and the sit-in near the Election Commission headquarters on Tuesday, they’re already planning the next round. Congress has called for nationwide protests on October 8, and the larger INDIA bloc is sticking to its “Save Democracy” programme that runs through that date. District-level marches and demonstrations are still on the cards, and MPs are expected to keep the pressure on Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. It all started building after that Indian Express investigation last month. The report said Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had put their objections on record at least 14 times in ten months. They were unhappy about decisions on adding and deleting voters, changes to Form 6, and the way the voter database was being handled. The opposition jumped on it, calling the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls a tool for “vote chori.” They want Kumar to resign, the SIR scrapped, deleted voters restored, and, in some cases, a return to paper ballots instead of EVMs. On September 30, leaders from 19 parties sat together for over three hours and finalised a plan. Mallikarjun Kharge announced “Save Democracy” marches in every district from October 2 to 8. MPs from both Houses were to march to the EC office on October 6. They also talked about meeting the President and filing cases in the Supreme Court against the 2023 law that gives the CEC and other commissioners certain protections. Tuesday’s protest was the first big street action. Rahul Gandhi led a few hundred MPs from Parliament towards Nirvachan Sadan. Akhilesh Yadav, Abhishek Banerjee, Supriya Sule, Sanjay Raut, and others walked with him. Police stopped them on Parliament Street. Things got noisy. Slogans like “Vote chor, gaddi chhod” and “Democracy not for sale” filled the air. Some leaders climbed barricades. Rahul even posted “Gyanesh, it’s done bro. Time to resign.” A group of Congress MPs, including Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, managed to enter the Akashvani Bhavan complex next door and sat there for hours. By evening, police detained Rahul, Priyanka, and several others. They were released later. Wednesday saw more of the same. Leaders met for lunch, then tried heading to Jantar Mantar in buses. Police stopped them again and detained a few more people. Rahul made it clear they won’t stop until Kumar resigns. “This is a fight to protect the most sacred thing in this country,” he said. “There is nothing that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah can do that will stop us.” Congress general secretary K.C. Venugopal has now written to state units asking them to organise protests at state, district, and block levels on October 8. They’ve called October 7 a “Black Day for Indian Democracy” after the detentions. The district marches under the original plan are still supposed to continue through the 8th, so expect more local actions across the country tomorrow. BJP has been pushing back hard. Leaders say this is just frustration after electoral losses. They call the opposition’s claims baseless and say the Election Commission is doing its job of cleaning up the rolls. The Commission itself has maintained that decisions were unanimous and that the SIR is a necessary exercise after years without a full revision. They’ve also said no formal meeting request came from the opposition before the October 6 march. What’s interesting is that some parties outside the strict INDIA fold have joined in. BJD MPs walked with the protesters, saying their leader Naveen Patnaik directed them because of concerns over voter deletions in Odisha. AAP has also been seen at some of the actions. The opposition is trying to project a broader front on this one issue even if they don’t always agree on other things. The demands remain the same: Kumar must go, SIR must be rolled back, genuine voters who were struck off should be put back, and some want ballot papers for future elections. They’re also talking about approaching the President and pushing cases in court. Five big rallies are planned for October and November, including one in Delhi on November 1. For ordinary people watching this, the core worry is simple. If the voter list isn’t clean and transparent, faith in the whole process takes a hit. Both sides claim to be defending democracy. One side says the Commission is compromised and lists are being manipulated. The other says the revision is overdue and the opposition is just sore about results. Tomorrow’s protests will tell us how much steam the campaign still has. Local units are being told to hit the streets at every level. In Delhi, the conversation is already about the next steps after the two days of detentions. The INDIA bloc keeps saying this is not about one man but about the institution. The government and the Commission keep saying the process is fair and the protests are political theatre. Whatever happens on October 8, the row is far from over. The MPs who marched on Tuesday and Wednesday have made it clear they intend to keep showing up. The district programmes are still running. And the demand for Kumar’s resignation is not going away quietly. It’s a messy, noisy fight that has put the Election Commission right at the centre of the political battlefield again. Sources:Indian Express, The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Print, Times of India, NDTV Profit, Outlook India, Frontline, The Diplomat, ANI reports. @Rohit Manral
Congress Hits Streets Across India Demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar Quit; AISA’s Neha Among Those Picked Up at Jantar Mantar
Yesterday on Friday the Congress and a bunch of student and civil society groups went all out against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. They’re saying he has to resign, some are even calling for his arrest. The whole thing is boiling over because of that Special Intensive Revision of the voter lists and that report about two other Election Commissioners raising objections several times. In Delhi the main action was around Jantar Mantar. AISA had called a protest, and a lot of familiar faces showed up – Neha Bora (she’s the AISA president), Dipankar Bhattacharya from CPI(ML), Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, Anjali Bhardwaj and others. Police said nobody had taken permission, so they started rounding people up. Neha was among those detained. They took her to Kanjhawala police station. From there she sent out a video saying basically, “We only came to demand accountability. We’ll be back tomorrow.” Altogether police picked up around 150 people from three spots near Jantar Mantar and DDU Marg. Most were released by evening. Delhi Congress chief Devender Yadav was also detained when his group tried to march towards the Election Commission office. It wasn’t just Delhi. Congress workers came out in a lot of places. In Patna the police turned water cannons on them. Same thing in Chandigarh. In Imphal they used tear gas. In Guwahati they detained Gaurav Gogoi. In Lucknow the state Congress president was taken away. People burnt effigies, shouted slogans, the usual scene. K.C. Venugopal from the Congress made it clear they’re not stopping. He said the protests will continue till Kumar goes. They’re talking about moving notices in Parliament and they’ve already announced district-level protests for Monday. There’s a CWC meeting on Tuesday too. The other side is saying this is all political drama. The Election Commission maintains that internal differences are normal and the final decisions on the SIR were unanimous. Police keep repeating that no permission was given, so they had to clear the area. That’s pretty much where things stand right now. The opposition is treating this as a big fight over the fairness of the electoral process, and the government and the EC are holding their line. Looks like next week is going to be noisy as well. Sources: The Hindu, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, Siasat, Telegraph India, Deccan Chronicle, National Herald (25-26 September 2026 reports). @Rohit Manral
Why India’s Election Commission is in the eye of a storm – again
The Election Commission of India used to be one of those rare institutions people still trusted. In a country as noisy and divided as ours, that mattered. You could argue about parties, about governments, about almost everything else, but the EC was supposed to be the referee that stayed clean. That reputation is taking a beating right now, and this time the cracks are showing from inside the building itself. The latest spark came from a detailed investigation by The Indian Express. It reported that the two other Election Commissioners — Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi — had formally objected, on the record, at least 14 times in the past 10 months to decisions taken under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Many of those decisions, they said, were made without their knowledge. We’re talking about changes to how new voters get enrolled (Form 6), the way names were deleted and restored during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, and the centralisation of the voter database itself. In one case the two commissioners even wrote to the Cabinet Secretary complaining about what they saw as a clear violation of the law governing the Commission. That is not normal. The Election Commission is a three-member body. Decisions are supposed to be by majority, ideally by consensus. When two of the three keep raising red flags and still get overruled or kept out of the loop, it starts looking less like internal debate and more like one man running the show. The Commission’s response has been that differing views are part of the process and that all final decisions were unanimous. But it has not answered the specific questions the two commissioners put on paper — who authorised certain changes, why the full Commission did not meet for stretches, who filed appeals on the Commission’s behalf in West Bengal, and so on. This is not happening in a vacuum. The Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, started in Bihar last year and has since rolled out across many states. The Commission says it is simply cleaning up rolls that had not seen a proper intensive revision in decades — removing the dead, the duplicates, the people who have moved. Fair enough in principle. But the scale has been massive. In Bihar alone the draft list dropped by around 65 lakh names. Across 30 states and Union Territories, more than 13 crore names have been struck off draft rolls. In West Bengal the numbers were especially raw — roughly 27 lakh deletions in the later stages, with judicial officers later restoring a large share of those who appealed. When nearly nine out of ten appeals succeed, you have to ask how many genuine voters got knocked off in the first place. Opposition parties have been screaming about this for months. Rahul Gandhi has called it “vote chori.” He has pointed to specific constituencies, like Mahadevapura in Karnataka during the 2024 general elections, claiming tens of thousands of dubious entries — duplicates, fake addresses, bulk registrations at single locations. Other parties have joined in, especially in states where elections are coming or have just happened. They say the process put the burden of proof on ordinary voters, many of them migrants, the urban poor, or people without the exact documents the Commission demanded. Some of those documents were the ones people actually use every day; the list of acceptable papers felt designed to exclude rather than include. The Commission and the ruling side push back hard. They say the opposition is crying foul because it lost. They insist every deletion can be challenged, that appeals mechanisms exist, and that cleaning the rolls is necessary for the integrity of elections. Dead people and double voters have no business on the list. Fair point. But the optics have been terrible. When the same institution that is supposed to be neutral starts looking opaque — refusing machine-readable lists for a while, destroying CCTV footage faster than before, centralising software control in Delhi against the objections of its own commissioners — trust erodes. There is a deeper background here that makes the current storm worse. The way Election Commissioners are appointed changed in 2023. The Supreme Court had wanted a panel that included the Chief Justice. Parliament replaced the CJI with a Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The opposition always said that gave the government a built-in 2-1 majority. Every appointment since has been viewed through that lens. When the man at the top of the Commission is seen as close to the government of the day, every controversial decision gets read as political, whether it is or not. Former Election Commissioners have called the internal dissent “unprecedented” and “very serious.” Opposition leaders are demanding Kumar’s resignation, some even talking of arrest or impeachment. A few are calling for the SIR to be paused and for court-monitored inquiries. The ruling party calls it an attack on the referee by sore losers. What is actually at stake is bigger than one Chief Election Commissioner or one revision exercise. In a democracy of this size, the only thing that keeps the peace is the shared belief that the count is honest. When large numbers of people start believing the voter list itself is being gamed — whether by over-enthusiastic cleaning or by selective blindness — that belief frays. Once it frays far enough, every result becomes contestable, every loss becomes theft, and the referee loses the authority to blow the whistle. The Election Commission still has the legal powers and the institutional memory to fix this. It can open its processes, answer the specific objections on record, restore genuine voters quickly, and show that majority decision-making inside the Commission is real. Whether it chooses to do that, or digs in, will decide if this storm passes or becomes the new normal. India’s democracy is loud and messy by design. It cannot afford a referee that looks like it has picked a side — or worse, looks like