By K Raveendran
India’s escalating confrontation over the Election Commission is no longer merely a dispute about electoral rolls or the conduct of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. It has become an institutional crisis touching the credibility of elections themselves. As opposition parties, activists and youth groups demand Kumar’s resignation over allegations of voter-list manipulation, the Supreme Court must confront an uncomfortable question of its own: could much of this uncertainty have been avoided had it decided, with reasonable urgency, the constitutional challenge to the law under which the Election Commission’s leadership came to be appointed?
The question cannot easily be brushed aside. Petitions challenging the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023, have been pending since January 2024. They raised an issue fundamental to democratic governance: whether Parliament could replace the selection arrangement prescribed by the Supreme Court in the Anoop Baranwal judgment with one giving the political executive a dominant voice.
That judgment had devised an interim mechanism under which the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition and Chief Justice of India would select Election Commissioners until Parliament enacted a law. Parliament subsequently legislated, but replaced the Chief Justice with a Union Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The resulting three-member committee therefore contained two members belonging to the executive and one opposition representative.
Whether that arrangement is constitutionally permissible is precisely what the Supreme Court was asked to decide. It did not. The Court refused to stay the legislation before the 2024 general election, and the substantive challenge then travelled through adjournments, recusals and procedural complications. More than two and a half years after the petitions were filed, a two-judge bench referred the matter for consideration by a larger bench. Meanwhile, the disputed statutory arrangement remained fully operational.
Gyanesh Kumar was appointed Election Commissioner in March 2024 and became Chief Election Commissioner in February 2025 under the new system. It would be unfair, and legally untenable, to conclude merely from the pending constitutional challenge that his appointment was invalid or that allegations concerning his integrity stand proved. Those are separate questions requiring evidence and due process. The Election Commission has strongly rejected accusations that electoral rolls were manipulated for partisan advantage. But that does not absolve the Supreme Court of responsibility for leaving the foundational constitutional issue unresolved.
Courts cannot prevent political controversy, nor can judges be expected to decide cases according to street pressure. Yet constitutional adjudication has a temporal dimension. A judgment delivered after the consequences that litigation was intended to prevent have already unfolded can become little more than an academic declaration.
Election Commission independence was never an abstract constitutional question. The Court itself recognised its centrality when it intervened in 2023. Once Parliament altered the selection mechanism and petitions immediately questioned whether the new law undermined that independence, judicial urgency should have followed naturally.
Instead, India entered successive electoral cycles without knowing whether the mechanism for choosing the officials supervising those elections met the constitutional standard of institutional independence. That omission matters enormously now.
The dispute has moved far beyond the original appointments case. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has generated allegations of large-scale wrongful deletions, excessive documentation requirements and opaque decision-making. Opposition parties claim eligible citizens have been disenfranchised. The Commission says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate, deceased and otherwise ineligible entries and protect the integrity of the rolls.
Those competing claims must be tested on evidence rather than political rhetoric. But public confidence in the referee becomes particularly fragile when an unresolved constitutional case continues to hang over the method by which the referee was chosen.
The crisis has deepened further with allegations that Kumar took important SIR-related decisions without the concurrence of the other two Election Commissioners. Petitions now before the Supreme Court refer to 14 disputed decisions and invoke the statutory requirement that Commission decisions should, as far as possible, be unanimous and otherwise determined by majority.
The Supreme Court has appropriately refused to suspend Kumar merely on the strength of allegations and newspaper reports. Removing a constitutional functionary without hearing the affected parties would itself raise serious due-process concerns. The Court has issued notices and indicated that disputed decisions can be examined if records establish violations. That caution is defensible. The earlier delay is much harder to defend.
The irony is striking. The Court is now being asked to examine the exercise of authority by a Chief Election Commissioner appointed through a process whose constitutional validity the same Court has left undecided since 2024. One unresolved institutional question has effectively collided with another.
This does not mean that the Supreme Court caused alleged voter-list irregularities, assuming any are ultimately established. Nor does judicial delay validate opposition accusations against Kumar. Responsibility for individual administrative decisions belongs to those who made them. The Court’s responsibility lies elsewhere: it allowed constitutional ambiguity over the independence of the Election Commission’s appointment mechanism to persist when certainty was indispensable.
There is still an opportunity to repair that institutional deficit. The challenge to the 2023 law deserves authoritative determination by an appropriately constituted bench without another cycle of postponement. The new petitions concerning alleged unilateral decisions require equally expeditious scrutiny of records, procedures and statutory compliance. The stakes extend beyond Gyanesh Kumar. Chief Election Commissioners come and go; the legitimacy of the institution must survive them. A country cannot indefinitely leave unanswered the constitutional question of how independent election commissioners should be chosen while simultaneously expecting citizens to repose unquestioning confidence in their decisions.
Judicial independence is protected partly because judges cannot be subjected to political convenience. Electoral independence deserves comparable constitutional seriousness. When disputes affecting the architecture of democracy arrive before the Supreme Court, delay itself can alter facts on the ground.
The present agitation is therefore also a warning about constitutional time. The Supreme Court need not accept the protesters’ allegations, endorse their demand for Kumar’s resignation or substitute itself for the Election Commission. But it must recognise that prolonged indecision helped create the vacuum in which suspicion has flourished. The Court now has another chance to settle what should have been settled long ago. This time, postponement would itself carry a constitutional cost. (IPA Service)
