Scrap the SIR, sack the CEC, reboot the system

If you were to judge the SIR and the conduct of the Election Commission of India and its chief Gyanesh Kumar by any reasonable yardstick of transparency, how would you rate them? Take a moment to recall what the many previous exposés about the SIR have revealed. Take just another moment to consider, dear friends and erstwhile colleagues in big media, if you could honestly tell your children how you looked away from all the evidence of wrongdoing. And now decide if it’s time to tell the story as you really see it. — Ed

If there was even a smidgen of doubt that India’s electoral rolls were being manipulated at scale, the latest investigation by Ritika Chopra of Indian Express should settle it. But let’s first track back to the most recent election in West Bengal, held after SIR, Phase 2.

Administrative and electoral officers in West Bengal remember the briefings with chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar before the Assembly polls in April 2026. “How is the josh?” the CEC was reported to have mockingly asked. Readers will remember that he was riffing on the 2019 Bollywood war drama Uri: The Surgical Strike, which made the line famous.

It was a surgical strike alright. He had ordered the replacement of all senior officers who would supervise the election and replaced them with officers of his choice. Over 500 officials were reportedly replaced in the state, down to the level of police inspectors in some constituencies. Officers were brought in from outside the state and there was unprecedented deployment of Central security forces.

The man, it was heard at the time, was an authoritarian who demanded nothing less than unquestioning obedience. Turns out, as the Express investigation reveals, he didn’t even listen to fellow election commissioners — Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi.

For four months this year, in the midst of a controversial SIR that has seen the deletion of ~13 crore Indian voters, the three-member ECI did not meet even once — not a single meeting between May and August 2026. The first meeting after May took place on 9 September, and only after Messrs Sandhu and Joshi finally wrote to cabinet secretary T.V. Somanathan flagging an ‘illegal’ administrative reshuffle in Nirvachan Sadan.

For a year starting mid-2025 (likely coinciding with the commencement of the SIR exercise, Phase 1 of which got under way on 24 June 2025), Joshi records in the note to the cabinet secretary, he and Sandhu received no agenda notes before an ECI meeting or the minutes of the meeting after. Between them, the two commissioners, co-equals with the CEC, represent the majority view in the ECI — which under the law must prevail. They flagged their concerns and dissent 14 times in the 10 months before September.

Sandhu and Joshi, Chopra’s report says, had on one occasion objected four times in a single day, flagging decisions taken and orders issued without their knowledge. Sandhu complained in writing that the ECI had acted against the written advice of two commissioners. (In other words, flouting the majority view.) These actions, Sandhu recorded, were unauthorised and illegal.

None of this has been denied by the ECI, which leads us to the inescapable conclusion that this once-revered institution is today not just divided but utterly compromised.

There is more. Transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj sought details of the deliberations that led to the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. She filed an RTI (Right to Information) application asking for the minutes of the meeting in which the decision was taken to conduct an SIR. The ECI declined the request, stating that there were no such records. Bhardwaj was also informed in writing that the decision to conduct the SIR was not taken by the Election Commission of India.

Deposing later in the Supreme Court, ECI counsel claimed the decision was prompted by a study that showed alarming discrepancies in the voter rolls of Bihar. No further details of the study — who did it, who commissioned it, what were the findings — were mentioned and no explanation was sought by the court either.

In July, Sandhu and Joshi objected to illegal changes in Form 6, used to enrol new voters. The changes required new voters to declare whether they themselves, a parent or a grandparent had appeared on the ‘last SIR roll’ in 2002-03. They pointed out that the ECI was not authorised to make changes in these forms; that changes can be made by the government and only after informing Parliament.

Under Section 13B of the Representation of the People Act, the ERO (electoral registration officer) is the legal custodian of electoral rolls in each constituency. Only field EROs are authorised to process applications, decide disputes and add or delete voters. Both Joshi and Sandhu flagged that they had heard from several EROs that their access to ECINet — the new interface introduced in January, integrating the earlier platform ERONet and 40 other applications — had been restricted, that the operation had apparently been ‘centralised’ without notifying the EROs.

In May, Joshi proposed an audit of the process. The audit, he wrote, must certify that ‘no one except the statutory authorities concerned has the credentials to make any change in the [voter] database.’ In August, Sandhu reportedly reiterated this. He recorded that state-level election officials were reporting they ‘don’t have proper and complete access’ to the ERONet portal, the system through which they maintain the electoral roll.

Joshi reportedly added in his note that Seema Khanna, the ECI’s director-general of IT, ‘does not have any legal authority to restrict proper and complete access and freedom to operate, as given by law, to the statutory authorities.’

Khanna was copied on repeated requests from state CEO offices, Express reports, citing an example from Goa where EROs cleared 97 voters for inclusion in the rolls, but could not make the changes in the database. There was no provision for corrections or a rollback of incorrect entries.

In Bengal, out of 38 lakh appeals pending before the appellate tribunals, 16 lakh appeals sought the deletion of voters cleared for inclusion by judicial officers appointed by the Calcutta High Court. ‘Who was authorised to file these appeals on behalf of the ECI, and by whom? Sandhu reportedly asked, also recording that neither he nor Joshi nor the chief electoral officer of West Bengal were informed.

During the claims and objections period of SIR, Phase 2, which covered three UTs and nine states (including West Bengal, where elections were held in April), it was revealed that Form 7s were submitted in bulk by booth-level agents (BLAs). The dreaded Form 7, as even unlettered Indians now know, is a way to object to the inclusion of a name or to seek the deletion of an existing name from the electoral roll. The ECI tweaked Form 7 guidelines to first widen the ambit of who could file these objections and then to allow bulk submissions.

This was used with impunity to target Muslims in several states (no prizes for guessing at whose behest), and if you were red-flagged and your name was struck off the draft roll, the timeline of the appeals process made it practically impossible to object, be heard and become eligible once again in time to cast your vote in the next election. Unless this entire exercise is scrapped and we return the voter lists to their pre-SIR baselines, we will see the same sequence repeat itself in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, which go to polls early next year.

If you’re still not convinced that the SIR must be scrapped, consider just one more inconvenient detail. India’s adult population is ~102 crore, and at the end of this SIR, only about 88 crore will make it to the purged voter roll. The ECI has not told us how many of these supposedly ineligible adults are the illegals (‘ghuspaithiye’) they wanted out.

That, you might remember, was the original rationale for embarking on this illegal SIR.