Why CEC Gyanesh Kumar Must Step Down Before India Votes Again

The protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar are no longer an occasional event in Delhi. Since late September they have moved from Jantar Mantar to the barricades on the road to Nirvachan Sadan, and from the national capital to Patna, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Srinagar. Students, civil society groups and now almost the entire opposition are asking the same question in much the same words. His continuation as Chief Election Commissioner is becoming untenable. He has lost the confidence of a large section of voters and of most of the country's major opposition parties. A Chief Election Commissioner with an ounce of conscience would recognise that the most honourable thing he can do for the chair he occupies is to leave it.

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These are not small allegations. Since the Special Intensive Revision began last year, more than 130 million names have been taken off India’s electoral rolls at the draft stage, marked as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate. That is more than the entire population of Japan. It is more than the populations of Germany and Canada put together, and close to five times the population of Australia. Some of those deletions will be legitimate, because rolls do carry the dead, the duplicated and people who have moved. But the Commission has never fully explained why these names were removed. It gives broad totals, and it counts people who have moved house and people who simply were not found at home as one group, without telling officials how to tell the two apart.

The process has also turned an old principle on its head. Citizens on the voter list were once presumed to belong there, and it was for officials to show otherwise before striking them off. Now they have to prove they belong, or lose their vote. That is not what the Election Commission of India exists to do. Its task is to bring every eligible citizen into the electoral process, and a referee in a democracy must not only be neutral but must also be seen to be neutral. On both counts, the Commission under CEC Gyanesh Kumar is failing.

The doubts are not confined to opposition parties, activists and anxious voters. They exist inside the Commission itself. It is now public knowledge that the two Election Commissioners who sit alongside the CEC, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, placed their objections on file at least 14 times in ten months. They described some decisions, including changes to Form 6, the form used to enrol new voters, and the centralisation of the electoral roll database, as unauthorised and illegal, and took some of their concerns to the Cabinet Secretary.

The Commission’s response was that differing views are a normal part of deliberation and that its decisions were unanimous. However, the Commission has never denied that the notes exist. Instead, it has described the objections as mere suggestions. In October, it went further and told the Supreme Court that every decision on the revision was unanimous, in an affidavit it says all three commissioners approved.

If CEC Gyanesh Kumar has struggled to carry his own colleagues, he has shown little interest in carrying the opposition. A Trinamool Congress delegation that went to the full Commission carrying nine letters from Mamata Banerjee says its meeting lasted seven minutes and ended with the CEC telling them to “get lost”. On October 6, about 240 opposition MPs had to march from Parliament towards Nirvachan Sadan simply to ask for a meeting with the three commissioners. They were stopped at barricades on Parliament Street, and Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were detained. It is the second time in 14 months that opposition MPs marching to Nirvachan Sadan have ended up in police detention.

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When the Government Chooses the Umpire

None of this criticism is unfounded, and much of it can be traced to the way the Commission is now put together. CEC Gyanesh Kumar is the first Chief Election Commissioner appointed under the 2023 law, which changed who gets to choose the people who run India’s elections.

In March 2023, a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court ruled in Anoop Baranwal vs Union of India that, until Parliament made a law, commissioners should be chosen by a panel of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. Within months the government brought a Bill that dropped the Chief Justice and put in his place a Union Cabinet minister nominated by the Prime Minister. The government now holds two of the three votes.

Gyanesh Kumar was named an Election Commissioner under this system in March 2024, days before the Lok Sabha polls were announced. He was elevated to CEC in a late night decision in February 2025, over the dissent of the Leader of the Opposition and two days before the Supreme Court was due to hear the challenge to the law. The rot did not begin with one officer. It began with a process designed to ensure the government is never outvoted.

The trust deficit is not a creation of the opposition either. The Supreme Court has repeatedly had to step in to make the Commission share information it should have made public on its own. During the Bihar revision in August 2025, it ordered the Commission to publish the details of 65 lakh names left off the draft roll, along with the reasons for their removal. It later directed that Aadhaar be accepted as a document of identity, and asked for details of 3.66 lakh people who appeared on the draft list but were missing from the final one. This year, in a press release on September 26, the Commission said the Supreme Court had upheld the declaration attached to Form 6. On October 5, Chief Justice Surya Kant said from the bench that no modified Form 6 had been approved by the court, and that it would examine the records to find out who made the changes. The Commission maintains that the form was never amended, and points to a May 2026 Supreme Court judgment that it says upheld the declaration. The court has said it will examine the records and decide whose account is right.

Most of these disputes could have been settled with data. How many names were deleted because the voter had died, and how many because a form was not returned? How many of those who filled Form 6 were genuinely new voters, and how many were citizens restoring names that should never have been struck off? Facing the press in August 2025, CEC Gyanesh Kumar did not say how many people had submitted the prescribed documents during the Bihar revision. 

For eight years the Commission refused to give parties machine-readable electoral rolls, which would allow anyone to check for duplicates and suspicious patterns. The CEC even claimed the Supreme Court had banned them, when the court had only declined to order the Commission to share them. Only last month did it partly relent. If the data would clear the Commission’s name, it has every reason to release it. Keeping it back only makes people wonder what it shows.

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Accountability That Keeps Being Denied

Then there is the question of immunity. Section 16 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023 says that no court can entertain or continue any civil or criminal case against a serving or former Chief Election Commissioner or Election Commissioner for anything done or said while acting, or claiming to act, in official duty. In plain terms, no voter, political party or prosecutor can take a commissioner to court over an official decision, whether the commissioner is still in office or long retired. 

The Supreme Court observed orally on October 5 that this protection may be wider than what judges enjoy. The clause was not in the Bill introduced in August 2023. It was added by a government amendment that December, and the law passed the Lok Sabha while 141 opposition MPs from both Houses were under suspension. Commissioners do need protection from frivolous suits, but the CEC already enjoys the same security of tenure as a Supreme Court judge, and the Commission’s decisions remain open to judicial review. The Association for Democratic Reforms has challenged Section 16, and the Supreme Court issued notice to the Centre and the Commission on October 13. The case is tentatively listed for November 6. ADR wants the provision struck down and the proceedings it ended revived against present and past commissioners. If the provision survives, no court will be able to hear a case against those who ran this revision over any official decision they took, even after they leave office.

It is a matter of shame that the opposition had to stage a public impeachment at all, because it tried the constitutional route first. On March 12, 130 Lok Sabha MPs and 63 Rajya Sabha MPs signed notices seeking the removal of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, the first such notice ever moved against a Chief Election Commissioner. On April 6, the Speaker and the Rajya Sabha Chairman refused to admit them, and the official bulletins gave no reasons. A reasoned order surfaced later, holding that the charges lacked the proof needed to constitute misbehaviour. That reasoning puts the cart before the horse, because establishing misbehaviour is the work of the inquiry committee the law provides for.

A fresh notice signed by 73 Rajya Sabha MPs on April 24 has been pending for more than six months. So on Saturday, denied permission at Ramlila Maidan and the Ashoka Hotel, the INDIA bloc turned Mallikarjun Kharge’s lawns into a mock Lok Sabha, with former Speaker Meira Kumar presiding. Thirty-seven people spoke, including MPs from 18 parties and voters whose names had been deleted. The exercise had no legal force. It still mattered, because it put on record what Parliament declined to hear, and because the people at the centre of this dispute were given a platform alongside the MPs.

On Sunday the message moved to the street. Marchers set out from the Minto Road junction near Connaught Place towards Ramlila Maidan, where Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, Tejashwi Yadav, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, M.A. Baby and K.C. Venugopal shared a stage with leaders of about 21 parties. Nearly 10,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed, parts of central Delhi came to a standstill, and auto drivers offered free rides to people heading to the ground. The demands were the restoration of deleted names, a return to paper ballots and the resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar.

The BJP held its own march the same day, with Amit Shah pointing out that Rahul Gandhi had been losing elections for 15 years, long before the revision began. That is a fair political point, and some of what was said at Ramlila, including the promise that the CEC will go to jail, went beyond what the record supports. But the central question remains. Can an officer facing almost the entire opposition on the streets credibly preside over the country’s elections?

The world is asking too. On May 1, three UN Special Rapporteurs, on minority issues, freedom of expression and freedom of religion or belief, wrote to the Indian government about the deletions, raising concern that Muslim voters had been disproportionately affected. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has also voiced concern over voter exclusion, and the V-Dem Institute’s latest assessment puts India’s electoral democracy index at its lowest since 1975. India presented itself to the G20 in 2023 as the mother of democracy, and CEC Gyanesh Kumar chairs the council of International IDEA, a global body on elections and democracy, for 2026. Neither the slogan nor the chairmanship will carry much weight if the world’s largest democracy cannot assure its own citizens that their names are safe on its rolls.

The timing makes this urgent. Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur are due to vote early next year, with their assembly terms ending between March and May 2027. Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat follow at the end of 2027, and the Commission will also conduct the Presidential election that year. CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s term runs until January 26, 2029, only weeks before the schedule for the next Lok Sabha election is expected. Every one of these assembly elections will be fought on rolls revised under his supervision, and every losing party will have a ready explanation. A resignation now would give a successor time to rebuild confidence before those elections, not after the results are already in dispute.

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A Resignation Alone Will Not Repair the Commission

Nor should the two Election Commissioners escape scrutiny. Sukhbir Singh Sandhu has been on the Commission since March 2024 and Vivek Joshi since February 2025. Their notes show they knew of decisions they considered illegal. Yet they never went public, never resigned, and allowed the revision to run on across state after state.

Then, in October, the Commission told the Supreme Court in an affidavit that all its SIR decisions had been unanimous and that Form 6 had never been amended, and said the affidavit carried the approval of all three commissioners. Either the objections were less serious than they appeared, or the two commissioners have signed an account the record does not easily support. Neither reflects well on them. The law does not help, since an Election Commissioner can be removed on the recommendation of the CEC, which leaves a dissenter dependent on the colleague he disagrees with. But a constitutional office demands more courage than a file noting.

If CEC Gyanesh Kumar does step down, the choice of his successor becomes the next battle. By convention the senior-most Election Commissioner is elevated, which would point to Mr Sandhu. Under the 2023 law, however, a search committee headed by the Law Minister prepares a panel of five names, and a selection committee of the Prime Minister, a Cabinet minister of his choosing and the Leader of the Opposition picks the new chief. The government would again hold two votes to one, and any successor chosen this way would carry the same question mark from the first day. The Supreme Court has not settled the challenge to the law either: the Chief Justice recused himself, and in September a two-judge bench split on sending the case to a larger bench. Replacing one man without changing the method would leave the next CEC facing the same doubts.

The remedy has been known for decades. The Dinesh Goswami Committee in 1990 recommended that appointments be made in consultation with neutral authorities such as the Chief Justice and the Leader of the Opposition. The Law Commission’s 255th report in 2015 proposed a collegium of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice, equal protection against removal for all three commissioners and an independent secretariat. Restoring a neutral member to the selection panel and narrowing Section 16 need only an amendment to the 2023 Act. Giving Election Commissioners the same security of tenure as the CEC requires amending Article 324(5) of the Constitution. Alongside, the Commission should publish every significant decision with dissents recorded, release deletion lists with reasons in searchable form, and place the burden of proving ineligibility on the state rather than the voter. None of this is radical. It is what a confident democracy owes its voters.

In the end this is a moral question before it is a legal one. CEC Gyanesh Kumar can point out that no court or Parliament has found him guilty of anything, and the Rajya Sabha Chairman has held that the charges did not meet the constitutional bar. But constitutional offices do not run on legality alone. They run on trust, and an Election Commission that has lost the confidence of voters, of the opposition and of its own members cannot deliver results everyone accepts. The Commission built that trust over more than seven decades through officers who understood that the office was larger than them. Stepping aside now would not be an admission of guilt. It would be the most important service CEC Gyanesh Kumar could still render to the chair he occupies.