If Gyanesh Kumar Goes, Modi Will Have to Follow Suit: Dipke
Mumbai, October 3 – Abhijeet Dipke is not mincing words anymore. The Cockroach Janta Party founder stood at Shivaji Park in Dadar and said straight out that if Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar does not resign, then Prime Minister Narendra Modi will have to go as well. He called the whole thing “vote chori” on a massive scale. Dipke claimed nearly 13 crore names have been struck off the voter lists in the last couple of years. That number, he said, is no coincidence. It lines up with the difference between the NDA and the opposition in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. According to him, once Kumar took over as CEC, the government started deciding who gets to vote and who does not. “Is this still democracy?” he asked the crowd. Dipke did not stop at the Election Commission. He pointed the finger directly at the Prime Minister. He said Modi is the one pulling the strings. If the Centre refuses to make Kumar quit, then the protests will demand Modi’s resignation next. “If Gyanesh Kumar does not leave his post, the Prime Minister will have to resign,” he told the gathering. He warned that Jantar Mantar 2.0 is coming, and even if they lock him up for three months, he will come back. The protest itself had a mix of young faces. People held placards, did street plays, sang a bit. Dipke announced the next steps: similar protests in Goa, Karnataka, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. If nothing happens by the end of October, they will camp at Jantar Mantar in Delhi. He made it clear CJP will not join the opposition’s planned protest on October 6. They want to stay separate. He put the current mess in a longer story. After 2024 did not go as the BJP hoped, he said they turned to voter-list changes in Maharashtra, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Leaders like Mamata Banerjee, Stalin and Kejriwal, he claimed, lost because so many voters simply disappeared from the rolls. At the same time, he said the party let opposition governments stay in some places while tightening its grip on the bigger states. He compared it to match-fixing. Dipke also spoke about the constant party-hopping. He said 111 sitting MLAs and MPs switched sides between 2022 and 2026. If legislators can be bought like that, why bother with elections at all? Just auction the seats like IPL players, he said. He brought up the splits in Shiv Sena, NCP and other regional parties, arguing the real aim is one country, one party. There is the internal report hanging over everything. The Indian Express had detailed how Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi put formal objections on record at least 14 times in ten months. Some of those notes said decisions were taken without them even knowing. The Commission’s line has been that different views are normal and every order is legally sound. Kumar is a 1988-batch Kerala cadre IAS officer. He became CEC in February 2025. Earlier he worked in the Home Ministry around the Article 370 decision and the Ram temple trust. He was the first CEC chosen under the 2023 law that changed how the panel is selected. Opposition parties have been after him for months over the Special Intensive Revision. CJP has now raised the stakes by tying his job to the Prime Minister’s. Dipke also made a broader appeal. He said the last twelve years have been spent dividing people on Hindu-Muslim lines. He asked people to put that aside and stand together as Indians first. Support whoever you want, he said, but right now the vote itself is under threat. Whether any of this forces a resignation is another matter. The Election Commission has given no sign that Kumar is leaving. The government has treated the internal notes as ordinary differences. Still, Dipke’s words at Shivaji Park have made the demand sharper. In his telling, Kumar and Modi are now linked. The protests are set to continue, and CJP says it will not back down until the CEC goes. Sources:ETV Bharat report on Dipke’s Mumbai statements, October 3, 2026Deccan Chronicle, Hindustan Times, Outlook India, ThePrint, Moneycontrol and PTI coverage of CJP protests and the SIR row, September 24 to October 2, 2026Indian Express investigation into objections inside the Election Commission @Rohit Manral
Plea in Supreme Court Seeks Suspension of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, Says Election Commission Decisions Must Be Collective
A petition is asking the top court to suspend Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar right away and make it clear that the Election Commission of India cannot run on one man’s word alone. The plea, filed by Rakesh Kumar Singh under Article 32 of the Constitution, comes against the backdrop of reports that around 14 decisions were taken in the name of the three-member Election Commission between October 2025 and August 2026 even though the other two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had put their objections down in writing. According to the petition, those objections kept coming up over months, sometimes more than once on the same day, and yet steps were still carried out as if the full Commission had signed off. What the petitioner is basically saying is this: Article 324 of the Constitution vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in “a Commission,” not in one individual. Yes, the Chief Election Commissioner is the Chairman under Article 324(3), but that does not turn him into the Commission itself. The plea asks for a writ of quo warranto — basically forcing Kumar to explain under what authority he has been acting as if the collective power belongs to him alone. It also wants him suspended while the court looks into the matter, the original institutional records of the Commission produced, and an independent judicial inquiry commission or special investigation team headed by a retired Supreme Court judge set up to examine how those 14 decisions were taken. This is not the only petition on the subject. A few days earlier, advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi had already approached the Supreme Court after The Indian Express reported the written objections by Sandhu and Joshi. That petition focuses more on the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. It seeks a declaration that any decisions, guidelines, directives or software changes made without the full Commission’s concurrence, or against the majority view, are unconstitutional and void from the start. It also asks for criminal proceedings under Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act and for an SIT to look into the alleged deletion of a large number of names from the rolls. Both petitions point to the same legal provision: Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023. That section says that when there is a difference of opinion among the members, the majority view prevails. The argument is simple — if two out of three are objecting on record, how can decisions still go out in the name of the entire Commission? The issues raised go beyond procedure. The earlier petition talks about changes to statutory Form 6 used for voter registration, the centralisation of powers that used to rest with local Electoral Registration Officers, software modifications that allegedly introduced new requirements without proper rule amendments, and specific problems reported in states like West Bengal. The newer plea by Rakesh Kumar Singh keeps the focus tighter on the institutional question: can the Chairman alone exercise powers that the Constitution gives to the Commission as a body? People who follow these things will remember that the Supreme Court has already dealt with the relative positions of the CEC and the other Commissioners. In the T.N. Seshan case years ago, the court made it clear that once Election Commissioners are appointed, the body becomes multi-member and the CEC does not enjoy a veto. The 2023 Act simply put the majority principle into statute. The current petitions are testing whether that principle was actually followed in practice over the past year. The Election Commission has maintained that its decisions were taken properly. But the existence of written objections by two Commissioners is now a matter of public record through media reports, and the petitioners are asking the court to look at the original files, notings, approvals and server logs to settle the question. For ordinary voters, the stakes are straightforward. The electoral rolls decide who gets to vote. If the process of revising those rolls or changing the software that manages them is happening without the full Commission on board, questions of fairness and institutional integrity naturally arise. That is why the petitions are asking not only for declarations about past decisions but also for a proper inquiry so that the same pattern, if it exists, does not continue. The Supreme Court has not yet listed or issued notice on the latest petition seeking suspension. Courts usually move carefully on matters involving constitutional bodies. Still, the filing itself puts the issue of collective versus unilateral decision-making squarely on the judicial table. At the end of the day, the Election Commission is meant to be an independent multi-member body that inspires confidence across the political spectrum. When two of its three members are recording repeated objections and decisions are still going out under the Commission’s name, it is only natural that someone will ask the highest court to examine whether the constitutional and statutory scheme is being followed. That is exactly what these petitions are doing. Whether the court grants interim suspension, orders production of records, or sets up an independent inquiry remains to be seen. What is clear is that the demand for transparency and collective functioning of the Election Commission has now reached the Supreme Court in formal petitions. Sources:LiveLaw (28 September 2026)The Indian Express (25 September 2026)Business Standard (25 September 2026)India Today (26 September 2026)WION (28 September 2026)The Tribune (28 September 2026) @Rohit Manral