The Election Commission must explain this tearing hurry to change the rules

The 2024 Haryana assembly election was concluded in November 2024.

On 9 December 2024, the High Court directed the ECI to hand over Form 17C and CCTV footage to petitioner Mehmood Pracha, who had approached the court after the Commission refused to part with them. Pracha’s plea that he was an interested party and the ECI’s own rules provided for public scrutiny of the details was accepted by the court.

On 17 December 2024, the Commission wrote to the union law ministry suggesting the amendment of Rule 93 of the Conduct of Elections (Rules) and asked to have it notified as early as possible.

The law ministry received the letter on 19 December.

The very next day, 20 December, the ministry convened a meeting with officials from the ECI and suggested changes in the draft amendment prepared by the Commission. The ministry’s revised draft was accepted by the Commission the same day. It was approved by officials in the ministry and the union law minister the same day and the amendment was notified the same evening at 10:23 p.m.

What explains the lightning speed with which the amendment was notified to restrict access to CCTV footage and Form 17C?

Arvind Gunasekara, who had reported on the amendment for news platform Scroll on 21 December, has now come up with an even more sensational bit of information.

He reported on 11 June 2025 that the ECI’s letter confirming the revised draft was ‘physically’ received by the ministry only on 1–2 January 2025. It was clearly so urgent an issue that the ECI may have sent its confirmation by email while it took time to send the physical letter ‘for the record’.

Significantly, no election is in the calendar for 2025 until November this year, when the Bihar assembly election is slated to conclude. So, unless the Election Commission wanted to stall the sharing of records from the Haryana and Maharashtra elections and Lok Sabha polls held earlier in 2024, what else can explain the extraordinary speed with which the amendment was notified?

The Election Commission of India needs to come clean and explain the haste. For instance, when did it realise that the rules were an impediment and could create ‘confusion’ if public scrutiny of the records were allowed?

The Election Commission had stonewalled similar demands made after the general election and the Maharashtra assembly election. Even when a village panchayat in Maharashtra decided to hold a mock poll by paper ballot to demonstrate the mismatch with the EVM count of votes, heavy police deployment prevented the exercise.

Did the Punjab and Haryana High Court direction come as the last straw? Since the amendment was notified 11 days after the High Court had passed the order, can the Commission hide behind the amendment to deny access to the petitioner?

Ironically, chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar claimed on 10 June 2025 that the process of preparing the electoral roll in India is among the “most rigorous and transparent” in the world.

He was delivering the keynote address at the Stockholm International Conference on ‘Electoral Integrity’, organised by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International-IDEA), in Sweden. The event was attended by representatives of election management bodies of around 50 countries.

If the process is indeed so robust and transparent as the ECI and the CECs have repeatedly claimed in recent years, there surely would have been no need for amending Rule 93 and restricting public access to its records?

Barely three days before the CEC was making that claim in Sweden, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had questioned the ECI on ‘transparency’ in his op-ed in the Indian Express.

Writing on ‘match fixing’ in Maharashtra, this is what the LOP wrote:

‘The EC… summarily dismissed requests to make available voter rolls with photos for the 2024 Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections… even worse, only one month after the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha elections, and following a High Court order directing the EC to share videography and CCTV footage of voting in a polling station, the central government — after consulting the EC — amended the 1961 Conduct of Election Rules Section 93(2)(a) to restrict access to CCTV footage and electronic records.’

‘The amendment itself, and its timing, are both giveaways,’ he concluded.