By Suresh Unnithan
The soul of a democracy does not live in rallies or marble halls. It lives in the polling booth, and in the integrity of the list that decides who may enter it. For decades the Election Commission of India was treated as the last institution that still understood that. The last fortnight has made that assumption harder to sustain.
On 23 September 2026, The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had, on at least fourteen occasions over ten months, placed written objections to decisions they said were taken or issued without their knowledge. The objections, according to that investigation, went to the heart of the Commission’s mandate: additions and deletions on the rolls, restoration of names, appeals, changes to statutory Form 6, and the custody and security of the central electoral database. Some notes described particular steps as “unauthorised and illegal.” The two commissioners are also reported to have written separately to the Cabinet Secretary after a work-allocation order that, in their view, weakened oversight of the Commission’s IT division.
None of this is a private quarrel. The Election Commission is a three-member constitutional body. The 2023 statute requires decisions, so far as possible, to be unanimous, and otherwise by majority. Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has put it plainly: a letterhead cannot supply authority that the statute withholds. The Commission is not another name for its chairman. Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa and former Supreme Court judge Justice Deepak Gupta have, in a public discussion with Kapil Sibal, raised the same institutional question—whether the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and related IT and Form 6 changes were processed as a collective commission or as a one-person operation.
The Commission’s reply must be given its due. After a full meeting on 26 September, it said the SIR order of 24 June 2025 was issued with the unanimous approval of the Commission, that the Supreme Court had upheld that order, that differences of view are normal in internal deliberations, and that highlighting a handful of notes while ignoring a larger body of approvals distorts the picture. It also announced that agendas will now be circulated in advance and minutes issued—an implicit concession that process had slipped. Process, in a constitutional body, is not a courtesy. It is the difference between a valid decision and an administrative act wearing the Commission’s name.
West Bengal is where that argument stops being abstract.
After the SIR, published figures put the contraction of the state’s rolls at about 91 lakh names: roughly 63 lakh under the usual absent-shifted-dead-duplicate categories at the draft stage, and about 27.16 lakh more declared “not eligible” after judicial officers finished the “under adjudication” list. The Supreme Court then directed the creation of appellate tribunals, each headed by a retired High Court judge. Those tribunals were meant to give deleted electors a timely hearing. On the Commission’s own later numbers, they have not.
An Election Commission affidavit before the Supreme Court recorded that of 38.20 lakh appeals filed, only about 1.02 lakh had been disposed of. More than 37 lakh matters remained pending. At the pace so far admitted, clearing the queue would take years, not weeks. A right of appeal that arrives after the citizen has already been shut out of the roll is not a remedy. It is an alibi.
Worse is what happens when a tribunal does hear a case. An RTI reply showed that of 82,782 appeals decided by early August, 91 per cent—75,443 names—were put back on the roll. A later Commission affidavit recorded that of 1,22,592 cases decided by 10 September, about 93 per cent ended in restoration: 1,13,943 names returned, 8,649 rejected. That is not a rounding error. When more than nine in ten of the deletions that actually reach an independent forum are found to have been wrong, the public is entitled to ask what the original deletion machine was doing. The sample is still a sliver of the backlog. It is large enough to destroy the claim that the purge was a routine spring-clean.
No newspaper can convert a restoration rate into a court decree. Only a competent court can decide what legal consequence follows. But a 93 per cent restoration rate among decided appeals, and a 37-lakh backlog left unheard, together create a case that cannot be treated as political noise. If a substantial share of those still waiting are, like the 93 per cent already heard, genuine electors, then the roll used in West Bengal had been thinned by error—or by a process that has not yet been explained.
That is why the question now asked of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar will not go away: on whose instruction was this architecture built? The honest answer, on present evidence, is that no public document names a handler. What the record does show is a CEC appointed under the 2023 law that replaced the Chief Justice with the Union Home Minister on the selection panel; two serving commissioners reduced to writing dissent and knocking on the Cabinet Secretary’s door; a Form 6 rewritten in ways they called unauthorised; a voter database whose write-access they said had been centralised; and a Bengal tribunal record that reads like an indictment of the deletions it was asked to review. A constitutional officer who behaves as if the Commission is a solo instrument invites the oldest suspicion in Indian public life—that he has become His Master’s Voice. Suspicion is not proof. Opacity is what converts suspicion into a national argument.
The culprits the public should demand to see are therefore not slogans. They are files. Who approved the Form 6 change? Who held administrator rights on ECINet? Who decided that 19 tribunals were enough for 38 lakh appeals? Who sat on agendas and minutes while SIR rolled across thirty States and Union Territories and draft deletions nationally crossed 13 crore names? Until those names and notes are published, with only legally necessary redactions, those who benefit from a quieter electorate will continue to hide behind the CEC’s statutory shield—and the CEC will continue to look less like a referee than like the last man left in the room.
What follows is not a slogan. The Commission should place the fourteen notes, the work-allocation orders and the minutes that supposedly converted dissent into unanimity on its website. An independent technical-legal audit of the voter software—who had write-access, what logs exist, whether local officers could implement their own restoration orders—should be commissioned from institutions that do not report to Nirvachan Sadan. The Supreme Court should examine not only the policy of intensive revision but whether particular operational decisions met the statutory test of collective decision-making, and whether a roll built while 37 lakh Bengal appeals sat unheard requires a further judicial look. Every name deleted at draft or adjudication stage must have a working, time-bound path back onto the list.
Cleaning an electoral roll is a legitimate duty. Centralising power inside the body that cleans it, while two of three commissioners say they were kept in the dark, and while tribunals later restore nine out of ten of the names they actually hear, is not. Democracy does not die only when ballots are stuffed. It also dies when names disappear, the hearing comes too late, and the institution charged with noticing cannot explain who decided, when, and by what majority. That explanation is still owed. Until it is given, in documents rather than adjectives, the booth will not look as sacred as the Constitution requires—and no press note can vote that doubt off the roll.
