Protests demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar's resignation have intensified in Delh (Photo: Aman Kanojiya/Media India Group)
It has been a rather heartening start of the week for Indian democracy. For well over two years, the Indian judiciary seemed to have gone to sleep on the wheel, while the foundation of the democracy, the voters’ list of the country, was being battered by the same organisation that is mandated with keep elections fair, free and inclusive, which instead has been summarily tossing out millions of citizens from the electoral rolls with its totally flawed process of Special Intensive Revision of the lists.
So, it was heartening to see that while on Monday, the Supreme Court took up the matter and began asking some tough questions to the ECI and specially the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, in a separate matter, the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court also took strong exception to the manner in which the SIR has been conducted and the severe curtailment of fundamental rights of millions of Indian citizens being caused by ECI riding roughshod over the process.
But perhaps the most encouraging words were heard from a sitting Supreme Court judge while delivering a lecture in a law university in Hyderabad on Sunday. Speaking at the valedictory address of the 19th NALSAR-Justice BR Sawhney Memorial Moot Court Competition at NALSAR University of Law in Hyderabad, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said that any process that results in the disenfranchisement of millions of Indian citizens would be “intrinsically arbitrary” and amount to a negation of the constitutional order.
Gyanesh Kumar
In a direct reference to the ECI, Bhuyan said no amount of “whataboutery” could justify taking away citizens’ voting rights.
“If any process results in disenfranchising millions and millions of Indian citizens making them second class citizens in their own country in the sense of being citizens without voting rights, such a process is intrinsically arbitrary. No amount of whataboutery can justify it,” he said.
Also Read:More arrests in Delhi as protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar continue
The judge said such a process would strike “at the very heart of the Constitution” and amount to a negation of the constitutional order adopted by India.
“Indian Constitution does not provide for two classes of citizens: citizens with voting rights and citizens without voting rights,” Bhuyan said.
He added that any process leading to the “wholesale disenfranchisement” of Indian citizens would be violative of Articles 326 and 14 of the Constitution. “No authority can do it; no court can condone it. No one is above the Constitution,” he said.
With Justice Bhuyan clearly drawing a red line for ECI and specially Kumar, it is surprising why the top court did not order an immediate suspension of the SIR, until the ECI sorts out the mess that is entirely of its own making.
A mindless, callous process
Right from the time when the so-called cleaning up of Indian electoral rolls, called the SIR, was announced, it stank. For a Constitutional body which is the first guardrail of Indian democracy and sanctity of the elections in India, the Election Commission of India has behaved in not only outright autocratic way but also in a manner that is completely opaque and highly suspicious about the objectives of the so-called revision of rolls.
Whether in Maharashtra, Bihar or in West Bengal and in every other sttae that has gone to the polls, each time the ECI has launched this mindless exercise just two or three months before the elections were conducted, making it obvious even to an average citizen that the due process could simply not be followed in the time left before elections.
Also Read: Election Commission in the dock over Bihar Elections 2025
Instead, ECI unilaterally removed millions of perfectly eligible voters without even following the due process written down in its own manuals and in the Constitution, as clearly pointed out by Justice Bhuyan. None of the citizens was accorded a hearing, which is mandatory, and the name was struck off.
It is only now that pieces of information are coming in, thanks to some very serious investigative journalism which thankfully still exists in parts of Indian media. The main reason behind the millions of mismatches in the rolls was the abhorrent and stupid idea of the ECI mandarins to use untested and unreliable Artificial Intelligence tools to translate all the names from various languages of the country into English.
Even a child would know that her Indian name could be spelt in several different ways in English, all of them correct. And every adult in India would know that practically every single document issued by the Union Government or State Governments has a different spelling, for no fault of theirs, simply because the officials or as is the trend now, the outsourced agency employees were themselves not English-trained or simply callous about their work to feed in the names and their spellings correctly. Throw a stone in a market in India and it is bound to hit someone with a differently-spelt name on School Leaving Certificate, Driving Licence, Aadhar and the voter card.
Having known the fundamentally serious flaws in its approach, the ECI should have stopped itself before even commencing the process. For over two years, it got away with a brazen murder of the very same fundamental right for millions of citizens that it is sworn to protect.
And it would have continued to get away, had it not been to the flurry of high profile citizens, including serving and former diplomats, Secretaries of Government of India and countless others in public limelight, who signalled their anxiety over finding their names missing from the rolls.
Faced with this unexpected backlash on very public platforms from senior bureaucrats, serving or retired, the ECI, read Kumar, came up with the brilliantly anti-Constitutional idea of creating a VIP list of voters, and hence trashing the foundation of democracy where every voter is equal.
According to a report by Reporter’s Collective, in July, when a large number of extremely senior officials of the Indian Government, including former Ambassadors and Secretaries of Ministries, reported that their names or names of their close family members had been deleted by the ECI as part of the farcical exercise called SIR, it created a feature called ‘VIP’ in an app meant for BLOs or Block Level Officials, who normally add or delete any voters from the electoral rolls.
The BLOs were reportedly told to ensure that no ‘VIP’, ranging from Union Ministers right down to local councillors and even media persons, were deleted from the list! At the same time, as many as 200 million voters in India may have been ejected, simply because the ECI has done a lousy job of revising the electoral rolls, right from the word go.
Also Read: Deletion of over 9 million voters in Bengal SIR sparks disenfranchisement concerns
With such large-scale and open undermining of the Indian democracy, the SC can no longer afford to continue to watch indifferently. It must immediately suspend the entire process and make it mandatory for the ECI, especially its top officials, to restore the voters’ lists that existed in 2024, before the ECI went on its rampage, cutting electoral rolls with an axe.
If that means, spending billions of INR in ensuring every eligible voter is back on the list as guaranteed by the Constitution, then so be it. There is no price too high or too exacting for democracy and if a country can pay billions for its elected politicians to jet around the world in elitist luxuries, it certainly can pay to ensure that even the poorest and the weakest sections of the society find their due place back on the voters’ lists.
It is also time that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar is ignominiously thrown out of his position and held accountable for his actions which have damaged ECI and the democratic institutions of India like never before.
