Supreme Court to Hear Next Week Plea Asking for CEC Gyanesh Kumar to Step Aside
New Delhi: The Supreme Court said on Tuesday that it will take up next week a petition that wants Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar stopped from doing his job until the case is fully heard. Senior advocate Vikas Singh stood up before Chief Justice Surya Kant and asked for an early date. He was appearing for the petitioner, Rakesh Kumar Singh. Singh told the court that the Election Commission is supposed to work as a team of three. Decisions should be taken together, either by everyone agreeing or by majority if they don’t. He said the way things have been going, there is real doubt whether that is actually happening. The Chief Justice simply said the matter would be listed next week. The petition asks the court to order that Gyanesh Kumar should not act as Chief Election Commissioner while the case is pending. In the meantime, it wants the other two Election Commissioners — Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi — to run the Commission by mutual agreement. If a vacancy comes up, the petition says any new appointment should go through a committee that includes the Chief Justice of India. What triggered all this are reports that roughly 14 decisions were taken in the name of the Election Commission between October last year and August this year, even though Sandhu and Joshi had put their objections on record. The petition talks about written notes and formal communications from the two Commissioners. Those objections cover things like letters and orders that went out without their say-so, meetings that had no proper agenda or minutes, changes made to Form 6 (the form people fill to get on the voter list), control over the big voter databases, shifts in how IT work was assigned, and appeals filed in the Commission’s name before tribunals in West Bengal. The basic argument is simple. The Constitution gives the power to run elections to the Election Commission as a whole, not to one person. The 2023 law that covers the appointment and service of the Commissioners also says decisions should be collective. Where there is disagreement, majority wins. The petition wants the court to ask Kumar to explain under what authority he has been acting as if he alone can exercise those powers. Apart from the temporary stay, the petition asks for the Commission’s original files to be produced. It also wants an independent inquiry — either a judicial commission or a special investigation team headed by a retired Supreme Court judge — to look into how those 14 decisions were taken. This is the second case in the Supreme Court that questions how the Commission has been working under Kumar. An earlier one had asked for criminal action linked to the big Special Intensive Revision of voter lists. That revision has already removed a huge number of names across the country and has been the subject of a lot of political heat. The Election Commission has said that differences among the three members are normal and that the final decisions, including those on the voter-list revision, were taken by everyone together. After the reports came out, the three Commissioners met, issued a joint statement, and even released a photograph of themselves standing together. Still, the petition insists the written objections raise serious questions about whether some of the steps taken in the Commission’s name really had the backing of the full body. It says the whole point of having three Commissioners is to stop one person from running the show alone. When the court hears the matter next week, it will first look at the request to keep Kumar from functioning as CEC for now. It will also have to consider the larger point about how the Commission is supposed to take decisions. The petitioner has asked that all the relevant records be kept safe so nothing disappears while the case goes on. For the moment, the Supreme Court’s decision to list the petition next week means these questions will come up in open court soon. Given how central the Election Commission is to free and fair elections, a lot of people will be watching what happens. Sources: The Tribune, LiveLaw, Deccan Chronicle, The Indian Express, NewsX, WION, Economic Times, Outlook India. @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