On October 12, Rahul Gandhi led thousands of marchers toward India’s Supreme Court, under a heavy police presence, and opposition leaders filed a petition seeking the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The noise obscures a story that, on the documented record alone, is serious enough without exaggeration. The allegations fall into four separate questions, and each stands or falls on its own evidence.
1. Were eligible voters wrongly removed?
A “Special Intensive Revision” rebuilds the voter list largely from scratch; every voter must re-establish eligibility. In West Bengal, the revision ran right up to the April 2026 state election and removed about 9.1 million names, roughly 12% of the electorate. Most removals were routine: people who had died or moved. But about 2.7 million people were removed after officials judged them ineligible. Appeals tribunals, set up only in March, had restored just 136 names before voting began.
By August 7, according to official figures obtained under the Right to Information Act, the tribunals had decided 82,782 of about 3.8 million appeals, about 2%. In 75,443 of those cases, 91%, the name went back on the roll. That is the strongest single fact in the case, and it should be read with care. The 3.8 million appeals include challenges seeking to remove names as well as restore them, and the cases decided first may not be typical. Even so, nine restorations in ten is not the profile of a careful process. Whatever the final rate, the restored voters had already missed the election.
2. Did the deletions decide the election?
The BJP won 207 of 294 seats, ending 15 years of rule by Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Critics say the deletions handed the BJP its victory. That claim may prove right, but it is not yet proven. It requires a constituency-by-constituency comparison of deletions against winning margins. The scale of the deletions makes the question legitimate; it does not answer it.
3. Did the Commission act lawfully as a body?
The Election Commission has three members of equal rank; when they disagree, the majority decides. On September 23, The Indian Express reported that the two other commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, objected in writing at least 14 times in 10 months, four times on a single day, and said decisions were issued in the Commission’s name without their knowledge.
One objection concerned Form 6, the voter registration form, which is fixed by regulation. A mandatory new question asked whether the applicant, a parent or a grandparent appeared on the list from the previous revision; applicants could not proceed without answering. Joshi reportedly wrote in May that the form could not be changed without amending the rules. Sandhu agreed, and in August reportedly called the change “unauthorised and illegal.”
The Commission’s answer is that such notes are part of internal deliberation and that every final decision was unanimous. Both accounts can be true only if the objections were resolved before decisions were issued, which is exactly what the Commission’s records would show. Meanwhile, within days of denying any split, the Commission restored the old form outside revision periods and promised advance agendas and published minutes. That is a partial concession, whatever it is called.
4. Was the Supreme Court misled?
The Supreme Court upheld the revision on May 27. The Commission later said the Court had approved the new Form 6 question. The Court has since said that it neither approved nor rejected the form, which did not exist when it ruled, and has sought records on who authorized the change. A former Supreme Court judge, V. Gopala Gowda, alleges that the Commission withheld the commissioners’ objections from the Court and wants the May ruling recalled. On the other side, 42 retired judges signed an open letter defending the revision as lawful and calling the attacks a political campaign without evidence. The May ruling still stands; the Court takes up the consolidated challenges on October 27.
The deeper issue: who picks the referee
In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that, until Parliament legislated, commissioners should be chosen by the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice. Parliament then replaced the Chief Justice with a minister chosen by the Prime Minister, giving the government two of the three votes. That was within Parliament’s power, and the law is now under challenge. Its practical cost is visible today: a Commission under suspicion cannot point to an independent appointment process to rebut it.
Streets or records?
The marches put the story on front pages, but they also handed the government a different story: permits, barricades and disorder. Supporters of the protests argue that a government that holds no press conferences responds only to pressure in the streets. Perhaps. But the strongest parts of the case are on paper: the restoration rate, the written objections and the Court’s own clarification. A disciplined public presentation of those records would put the burden where it belongs, on the Commission, to produce its files and answer three questions. Who changed Form 6, and under what authority? Were two of the three commissioners bypassed? And why did the Commission say the Court approved a form the Court says it never approved?
For American readers, the point is not partisan. Coverage that frames this as Modi versus protesters misses where the dispute will be settled: in the Commission’s own files, now that India’s highest court has asked to see them.
— John Laxmi
