By Arun Srivastava
CEC Gyanesh Gupta on September 26, in the eye of the biggest-ever electoral scandal to rock the country, covertly confessed to have committed the criminal misdemeanour of massive voter deletions and electoral manipulation, at the full member meet of the Election Commission of India. As a temporary reprieve, he used the full meeting of the Commission held on that day to cover up the scheme hatched by him to serve the various electoral interests of his political masters and to defuse the intense internal and external crisis over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
CEC Gyanesh, who had earlier adopted an intransigent attitude towards legitimate criticism and refused to listen to solemn advice for mending his attitude, made a tactical retreat at the all-member ECI meeting. With nationwide protest exploding on his face, CE Gyanesh had no other option but to accept the culpabilities as unintended and subsequently announce several crucial voter-friendly reliefs. The significant relief has been his proposal to send Booth Level Officers (BLOs) directly to citizens’ homes to collect documents. This has been one of the most important demands of the two other Election Commissioners, as they had objected to handling and oversight of BLOs, and the centralisation of electoral roll databases through the IT division, noting that the IT Director General’s (Seema Khanna) actions effectively restricted or bypassed statutory officers, including Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and field-level coordination.
Earlier, ECI used to send its staff for door-to-door verification, but with launching of the SIR, the onus was on the voter to prove his/her credentials. The Election Commission has been asking voters to verify their credentials on the plea of eliminating ghost, duplicate, or outdated entries. The ECI asserts that maintaining a clean voter roll is necessary for free and fair elections. Does it imply that all the previous elections, even held in 2024-25 in Haryana, Maharashtra and other states were not fair and free? It was for the first time in the electoral history of India that the CEC Gyanesh Kumar-led ECI made it mandatory for the voter to prove his genuineness, and not the electoral officer to prove his objections, if any.
CEC Gyanesh had so far refused to budge, despite slew of reports emerging on the mass deletions of the names of voters from Dalit, backwards and minority communities, who were perceived to be anti-BJP. CEC even introduced the absurd concept of “logical discrepancy” to exclude the vulnerable voters en masse. However, given the barrage of protests all across the country and the seething populace, among them many from the ruling dispensation itself caught in the dragnet of SIR-led mass deletions, the CEC has had to relent, perceptible in ECI’s latest resolve that voters need not visit election offices.
It is absolutely clear that CEC Gyanesh Kumar is playing truant in the matter of scrapping the most-despised SIR and discarding the obnoxious additions to Form 6. The façade of holding a full commission meeting, where he announced that the old Form 6 will be used during the non-SIR period, is merely an attempt to cover up the wrongdoing of disenfranchising the country’s poor and minorities, as well as those from vulnerable population groups. His assertion on “non-SIR period” makes it explicitly clear that he treats Indians as a dispensable lot, not as equal citizens of the country.
Instead of making a candid declaration that this utterly flawed and cruel SIR exercise will not be scrapped and changes on Form 6 would remain there, CEC Gyanesh Kumar took the long winding road of equivocation. A non-SIR period refers to the normal, regular time outside of an active SIR cycle when normal voter registration and roll maintenance rules apply. He tacitly conveyed the message that SIR will continue till the mission is accomplished. India is now under the SIR period and it could be safely said that no normal registration of voters would take place in near future until the SIR is over, or hopefully, scrapped.
CEC Gyanesh’s loyalty to the ruling BJP led by PM Modi continues to baffle. In spite of facing intense humiliation and insult, and expose of his horrid design to demolish the basic tenets and character of the democratic functioning, he continues to implement illegal and anti-people SIR. He is undeterred enough to also use the veil of the Supreme Court to justify his patently unconstitutional actions. After being accused of unilaterally and illegally altering Form 6 by adding parental declaration requirements for new voters without undergoing proper statutory amendments, the ECI later “clarified” that all SIR-related decisions were approved unanimously by the full ECI and the Supreme Court. Under Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, any change in the form must be placed before the Parliament. Altering the online form without due process is an illegal overreach. On its own part, how the Supreme Court approves SIR given the illegitimate changes in Form 6, would be intriguing.
While PM Modi claims of reaching out to Gen Z, the ECI under CEC Gyanesh via the unwarranted procedural changes, deliberately attempt to block Gen Z voters from exercising their adult franchise. In July 2026, the online application portal, ECINET, was updated to include an additional mandatory declaration. Before 2026 SIR, the last SIR of electoral rolls by the Election Commission was held during 2002–2004. Under the new SIR directive, the first time Gen Z voters have to track down their parents’ or grandparents’ historical booth and serial numbers, an extremely cumbersome move that creates unnecessary roadblock and needless redtape. This diktat could effectively disenfranchise millions of eligible youth from poor and migrant backgrounds, whose families lack immediate access to old records. The other two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had initially raised strong internal objections, warning that the modification was “unauthorised” and could lead to mass voter harassment.
The move is also against the basic tenet of the Constitution. The right to vote is mentioned under Article 326 in the Constitution of India. CEC Gyanesh claims that the central motto of the SIR process is to ensure that “no eligible citizen is left out and no ineligible person is included”. But in reality, it is just the contrary. It eliminates genuine voters who do not subscribe to the Hindutva politics of RSS and BJP. How ECI would justify its claim of enrolling genuine voters, when at the instruction of CEC Gyanesh-led ECI, around 33 lakh genuine voters were deleted under SIR in just Delhi, and previously 65 lakh names were omitted following Supreme Court directions in Bihar, and 37 lakh were kept out of revised voter rolls in West Bengal, which underwent assembly elections that resulted in the first-ever BJP government in the eastern state, something unthinkable even a few years back.
Meanwhile the Constitutional Conduct Group, a collective of former civil servants, has demanded the scrapping of the SIR altogether, alleging that the exercise could undermine voting rights, damage the Election Commission’s credibility and make a mockery of democracy. They claimed, “The SIR, which has placed the burden of proof of citizenship on the voters, is transgressive and without any constitutional justification,” and should be discontinued in view of “numerous instances of bulk deletions, absurd additions, sloppy documentation, partisan instructions and unreasonable harassment to citizens have come to light, both episodically as well as through well-researched examinations of the process”.
They also argued: “After a great deal of deliberation, we have come to the inescapable conclusion that the SIR exercise needs to be scrapped lest it undermine our commitment to universal adult suffrage, seriously damage the reputation of the ECI, and make a mockery of our democracy.” CCG also pointed out that under SIR already bulk deletion of over 13 crore voters from draft rolls, forcing citizens to carry an unlawful burden of proving their citizenship via a modified registration document, has taken place. Multiple petitions have been filed across the judiciary, including a plea in the Supreme Court seeking the prosecution of Gyanesh Kumar under Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act for executing these guidelines without lawful consensus. ECI has been misrepresenting judicial observations.
The INDIA bloc would be meeting in Delhi on September 30 to formulate a collective strategy against CEC Gyanesh, whom Mamata Banerjee has accused of manipulating the West Bengal state elections to facilitate a BJP victory. For protecting democracy and fighting autocratic functioning of Modi and Gyanesh, she would have no hesitation in joining hands with the CPM. Mamata has said: “Simply questioning Gyanesh Kumar will not be enough. The role of Seema Khanna and others must also be questioned, and everyone involved in these processes must answer for their actions.”
SIR has already been completed in 20 States/UTs including Bihar and West Bengal. In yet another conciliatory move Gyanesh maintaining the façade of democratic functioning announced that any person whose name got left out during SIR or thereafter, and a first-time voter, may apply to the concerned ERO, for inclusion of their names in the electoral rolls under the process of continuous updating. CEC then directed the CEOs, DEOs, EROs to immediately launch a special drive for enrollment of these electors.
The “nine decisions” which were issued by CEC Gyanesh-led ECI after the all-member meeting were nothing more than cosmetic fixes, which in fact further exposed his authoritarian working style. These underscored how CEC Gyanesh trampled on the democratic internal functioning of the Commission, and behind the façade of putting up a show of how democratic the functioning of the Election Commission was, the CEC was attempting to reverse his universally panned unilateral decision-making and software overrides. The nine decisions include circulation of advance Agendas; mandatory recording of Minutes of the meeting; enforced compliance of the instructions of the ECs; directly restricting the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) from making unilateral policy orders without the knowledge of the full panel; reversing flaws where the centralised software overrode ground-level officers (EROs); restoring power back to local Electoral Registration Officers (EROs); Goa Voters Resolution; mandating physical doorstep verification for specific voter categories instead of automated software deletions; extending revision timelines in high-stakes territories like Delhi and Maharashtra. (IPA Service)
