The Hindu Editorial

THE HINDU EDITORIAL

September 27, 2026

Deep rot: On the Election Commission of India’s functioning during its SIR

With the SIR thoroughly vitiated, CEC Gyanesh Kumar must resign

The investigation by The Indian Express into the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) functioning during its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) shows that the disquiet over what transpired under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s watch is not limited to civil society, the media and the Opposition. It ran through the ECI itself, as Election Commissioners (EC) Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected on record at least 14 times between October 2025 and August 2026 to decisions, many of which, they said, were taken without their knowledge. Their dissent mirrors what many have long said about the SIR. In May, Mr. Joshi had warned that Form 6, the application for new electors, could not be altered without the government amending the rules. Yet, in July, the form contained questions on whether the applicants or their parents or grandparents figured in the “electoral roll of the last SIR”, which Mr. Sandhu called “unauthorised and illegal”. The ECs also flagged the centralisation of the electoral roll database, sought an audit, and recorded that field officials lacked complete access to the ERONet portal. This mirrors what local election officials had complained of: that many of the changes in the rolls were done at the central database level overriding Electoral Registration Officers, the statutory authority on voters’ eligibility.

The consequences of the anomalies in the ECI’s decision-making and its functioning were the deepest in West Bengal. About 60 lakh electors were flagged for software-generated “logical discrepancies” — many were dubious — and 27 lakh names were deleted. Of the 38 lakh appeals pending before tribunals, 16.1 lakh were by those seeking to remove voters whom judicial officers had included; Mr. Sandhu’s question of who authorised filing them on the ECI’s behalf remains unanswered. Meanwhile, over nine in 10 appeals against deletion decided so far have restored the electors, which suggests that the exercise struck off lakhs of genuine voters before the West Bengal elections. The Hindu’s analysis also revealed that 24 of the 70 seats in Delhi now have fewer electors in draft rolls than those who actually voted just a year and a half ago. On Wednesday, Justice Dipankar Datta, as part of a two-judge Bench, held in his opinion that the 2023 Act’s replacement of the CJI, whom the Anoop Baranwal judgment had placed on the selection panel, with a Union Minister, fails the “perception test”. It was this panel that chose Mr. Kumar as CEC. Regrettably, the Supreme Court had earlier upheld the SIR without adequately confronting its design, which deletes electors before verification and places the burden of proving eligibility on the citizen rather than the state, thereby defeating the constitutional guarantee of universal adult franchise. Mr. Kumar must resign and the Court must halt further deletions until the roll database is audited. Anything less will be a defeat for India’s democracy.