By K Raveendran
The controversy surrounding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has moved beyond another confrontation between the government and the Opposition. What is now at stake is whether the Election Commission of India can continue to command the presumption of institutional neutrality on which the credibility of elections ultimately rests.
The latest developments have made that question considerably harder to dismiss. Reports that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi raised objections on at least 14 occasions over ten months to aspects of electoral-roll management, including changes affecting voter enrolment, deletion procedures and control of electoral databases, have opened an extraordinary window into the functioning of an institution whose internal deliberations normally remain invisible.
The political response has made the institutional problem worse. A dozen BJP chief ministers were mobilised over the weekend to defend the Election Commission and attack Rahul Gandhi and the INDIA bloc over their allegations against it. Opposition parties, meanwhile, intensified demands for Kumar’s resignation and judicial intervention. What should have been answered principally through documents, procedures and transparent institutional explanations consequently became another government-Opposition battle.
That is precisely where the damage lies. The mobilisation of BJP chief ministers may not, by itself, prove collusion between the government and the Chief Election Commissioner. Political parties routinely defend institutions when attacks on those institutions intersect with their political interests. But the scale and coordination of the BJP’s intervention inevitably create an appearance problem. An Election Commission confident of its institutional processes should need no political shield. Its defence ought to reside in the record.
More significantly, the Commission itself has now introduced measures that implicitly acknowledge the need for stronger procedural safeguards. It has decided that agendas for Commission meetings will be circulated beforehand and minutes issued. It has ordered a review of ECINet, eased procedures for voters facing discrepancies and provided for officials to collect documents from affected voters at their homes. It has also removed the additional SIR declaration from online Form 6 in states where SIR has concluded.
These may be sensible corrective measures. But they also raise an unavoidable question: why did procedures requiring greater transparency, collective deliberation and safeguards for voters become necessary only after internal objections became public? That question goes to the heart of the controversy. No doubt, electoral rolls require revision. Deaths, migration, duplicate entries and changes of residence make periodic cleaning indispensable. The Election Commission has both the authority and the obligation to ensure that only eligible citizens remain enrolled while every eligible citizen is able to register. The Supreme Court upheld the Commission’s authority to undertake SIR in its May judgment.
The democratic test, however, is not merely whether rolls are accurate. It is how errors are distributed. Wrongly retaining an ineligible voter and wrongly removing an eligible voter are both defects, but the second deprives a citizen of political agency. Any revision exercise involving millions of entries must therefore place an exceptionally heavy burden on the state to prevent wrongful exclusion and provide accessible remedies.
That is why allegations surrounding SIR cannot be answered merely by asserting statutory authority. The central question is whether the exercise contains adequate protections against disenfranchisement and whether the Commission can demonstrate that decisions affecting enrolment and deletion were taken lawfully, collectively and transparently.
The Supreme Court now has an opportunity to examine precisely that issue. It has agreed to hear next week a petition challenging Kumar’s functioning and questioning whether decisions attributed to the Election Commission were actually decisions of the three-member constitutional body. Another petition has sought an investigation into alleged unilateral decisions and large-scale deletions. These remain allegations requiring adjudication; they should not be converted into established findings before the evidence is tested.
But the constitutional question is substantial. The Election Commission is not the Chief Election Commissioner acting under an institutional label. Since it is a multi-member body, collective decision-making is integral to its legitimacy. If important directions were issued without the knowledge or concurrence of the other commissioners, the issue would extend far beyond Kumar’s administrative style. It would raise the question whether powers constitutionally entrusted to a commission had effectively been exercised by an individual.
The Supreme Court’s role assumes unusual importance. There is also a larger jurisprudential problem surrounding the franchise. Indian case law has not always spoken with one voice about whether voting should be characterised as statutory or constitutional. The Court reiterated in April that the right to vote is not a fundamental right and is governed by statute. Yet its May SIR judgment described voting as a “valuable constitutional right” and stressed that electoral integrity depends upon both inclusion of eligible citizens and exclusion of those legally unqualified.
That tension matters more than the terminology. Article 326 embeds adult suffrage in the constitutional architecture. Elections themselves are indispensable to representative government. Treating the mechanics of voting as statutory cannot logically mean that administrative authorities enjoy diminished obligations when deciding who enters or disappears from an electoral roll. Quite the contrary: if Parliament has created enforceable electoral rights through statute, courts have an obligation to ensure scrupulous compliance with those protections.
The danger lies in allowing the statutory-right doctrine to become an argument for reduced judicial scrutiny. A democracy cannot proclaim universal adult suffrage constitutionally and then regard exclusion from the machinery necessary to exercise that suffrage as an ordinary administrative inconvenience. The Supreme Court need not decide whether the BJP benefits politically from SIR, nor should it attempt to determine partisan motives without evidence. Its task is more fundamental. It can establish whether electoral-roll decisions complied with statute, whether the Commission functioned collectively, whether affected voters received adequate notice and remedy, whether database controls respected legally assigned authority, and whether safeguards against arbitrary exclusion were sufficient.
That would also address the deeper institutional problem exposed by the controversy. India’s electoral system ultimately runs on public confidence. Courts cannot manufacture that confidence, governments cannot confer it and political parties cannot substitute for it. The Election Commission must earn it through visible independence, procedural consistency and verifiable neutrality.
The coming Supreme Court hearing therefore offers something larger than adjudication of another SIR petition. It provides an opportunity to clarify that the independence of the Election Commission means not simply freedom from formal governmental direction, but collective decision-making, statutory fidelity, transparency and an institutional presumption in favour of protecting every eligible citizen’s franchise. For a constitutional democracy, there can be few questions more consequential than who gets to decide who gets to vote. (IPA Service)
