Last month, by accessing internal emails through confidential sources, The Indian Express established that the chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, was running the commission largely on his own, and that the two other election commissioners were being systematically sidelined. This has created a furore in Indian politics. 

The two other commissioners put their concerns on record at least 14 times in the last 10 months. They complained about objections filed to delete voters from the rolls; questioned the appointment of key personnel without approval; and flagged the centralisation of control, which took power away from regional officers to update the electoral rolls. In one email, they complained that they learned of an important decision only through media reports. 

The Indian Express findings are significant given that the Election Commission’s functioning has been under the scanner for the past couple of years. Opposition members repeatedly alleged that the commission was being partial towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). For instance, the commission took no action on objectionable speeches by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other key BJP leaders in their election speeches. It also failed to act fairly after the BJP engineered the breakup of regional parties. In the case of the Shiv Sena and the NCP in Maharashtra and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the commission readily recognised the breakaway factions and allotted them the name and symbol of the parent party.

The most serious of the concerns, however, related to the conduct of the special intensive revision (SIR) by the commission involving nationwide updating of the electoral rolls, which the opposition denounced as a process for mass deletion of voters.

The three members of the commission are at parity, and decisions are usually taken unanimously or after the chief Election Commissioner takes everybody on board. This is an institutional feature designed to  limit bias and political interference in the commission’s working. 

The Indian Election Commission is intended to be a non-partisan body with no ties with the government. This had broadly been the case up until 2014, when the commission chose to work quietly and keep its distance from the government. This settled position began to change once the BJP came to power in 2014. 

The three-member body tasked with selecting the commissioners had included the prime minister, the leader of the opposition and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. In 2023, the government changed the law and replaced the Chief Justice with a cabinet minister, giving it full control over the appointment. Both Gyanesh Kumar and his predecessors were seen as political appointees acting as an arm of the executive, eroding trust in the commission. This was reflected in surveys in 2025 where more than a quarter of people said they had lost trust in the commission, significantly higher than in 2019. 

The neutrality of the commission was further called into question with the special intensive revision. While electoral rolls had been revised from time to time, previous exercises only required citizens to show that they resided in the area. In contrast, the SIR appeared more a test of citizenship than eligibility for voting, despite the Election Commission not having the mandate to determine citizenship.

The SIR, which began in Bihar in 2025, had to be heavily supervised by the Supreme Court following objections from the opposition and civil society groups. People who resided in the state for a long time were asked to submit additional documents. The commission initially refused to accept many commonly used identity cards and was reluctant to provide machine-readable data of the lists for analysis. 

The SIR in West Bengal saw approximately 2.7 million deletions of present residents who were part of the previous electoral rolls. A significant number of these deletions were concentrated within minority constituencies and opposition strongholds. Many deletions were due to ‘logical discrepancy’, a special category introduced by the commission in which small changes, such as in the spelling of a name, led to deletion. Objections were filed en masse by members affiliated with the BJP to remove minority voters. 

The pattern was repeated in the other states where the SIR was conducted. The result was millions of people deleted and hardship for those asked to submit additional verification. At the last count, nearly 13 crore voters had been struck off the rolls nationwide, an unknown number of which were eligible voters.

There was widespread perception that the commission was carrying out the SIR at the behest of the government. The government, for its part, justified it at every step, claiming it was necessary to remove undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.  

For many observers and members of the opposition who had for years been complaining of vote chori and the partisanship of the commission, the revelations were hardly news. Leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, had made detailed presentations all through 2025 suggesting unusual additions and deletions in the electoral rolls in several constituencies. The allegations were routinely dismissed by the commission. 

For now, the opposition is demanding removal of the Chief Commissioner and the rollback of the SIR. These are no doubt difficult demands which the government is unlikely to accept. In the meantime, the Cockroach Janta Party, which was at the forefront of the students’ protest a few months back leading to the resignation of the education minister, has also picked up the issue and vowed to launch a nationwide stir. 

How it goes from here will largely depend on the opposition’s ability to unite and mobilise ordinary people on the issue. The government will hope the matter subsides on its own, but there is little doubt that the revelation raises important questions about the sanctity of the electoral process in the world’s largest democracy.