The Defence Put Forward By The Election Commission Answers a Question Nobody Asked
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-09-24 06:10:19
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
The Election Commission's explanation does not meet the charge against it. The charge is not that three commissioners disagreed. It is that, on the written record of two of them, decisions were taken and orders issued in the Commission's name without the Commission's approval. A statement about healthy debate cannot dispose of an allegation about who decided. This piece does not assume that any contested decision was unlawful. It asks whether the Commission's explanation is adequate to the record.
The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally objected at least 14 times in ten months to SIR-related decisions and orders that they said were made without their knowledge. Sandhu recorded that the Commission had acted against the written advice of both commissioners, and he called the action "unauthorised and illegal". In April, both told senior officers that communications were going out in the Commission's name without its approval. These are not the remarks of dissenters at a drafting table. They are two constitutional office holders putting an alleged breach on file.
The Commission's reply has four planks. Differing views and written notes are normal in a multi-member body. Every officer may offer suggestions. The report, it says, highlighted selected internal notes from a ten-month period and left out a larger body of approvals, decisions and initiatives. And all final decisions, it maintains, followed law and the procedures under the 2023 Act. None of those explanations answers the central question raised by the record.
Take the claim that these were draft-stage queries. The Form 6 episode does not fit it. The revised form asks applicants whether they, their parents or grandparents were part of the last SIR, and the online form cannot be submitted without an answer. Sandhu put on record that the change was unlawful and must be removed immediately, after it had already been reported in the media. A draft can be revised. A live form has to be pulled down. The commissioners' legal ground was that only the Union government can amend the rules governing electoral forms under the Representation of the People Act, 1950. That is a legal objection. It is not a suggestion.
Take the claim that every officer may offer suggestions. It is true and irrelevant. Officers advise, while commissioners are the Commission. Section 18 of the 2023 Act requires decisions to be unanimous as far as possible, settles disagreements by majority, and allows the Commission's work to be divided only by unanimous decision. Treating their recorded objections as mere suggestions risks collapsing the distinction between a commissioner exercising his statutory role and an officer offering administrative advice.
Take the claim about selective notes. The legality of each contested decision has to be established on its own record, not by pointing to the volume of other decisions taken by the Commission. If the Commission holds a record showing that each of the 14 matters was properly decided, the answer is simple. It should produce the file notings and the minutes. A press statement about the size of its workload is not evidence of process.
Take the claim that everything followed the law. That is an assertion. Section 18 instead poses a straightforward question of institutional authority. When two of three members object in writing, what recorded majority makes a contested step the decision of the Commission? The Commission has not said. The West Bengal appeals sharpen the question. Sandhu asked in writing who was authorised to file appeals on the Commission's behalf and who actually filed them, and he recorded that neither the state's chief electoral officer, Joshi nor himself had been told the basis. The Commission has since told the Supreme Court that 16.10 lakh of the 38.31 lakh appeals before the West Bengal tribunals sought deletion of voters whom judicial officers had included. Appeals on that scale, if filed on the Commission's behalf, should have a traceable authority behind them.
The database issue goes to the heart of the exercise. Joshi warned in May of a gradual centralisation of the electoral roll database and proposed an audit to certify that only the statutory authorities held credentials to alter it. In August, Sandhu recorded that state-level officials said they lacked proper and complete access to the system. The law places each roll with the electoral registration officer. Whoever controls access to the database has the practical ability to alter the roll, which makes the question of statutory authority over that access critical. More than 13 crore names have been removed from lists and draft rolls across the three phases so far. Both commissioners also wrote to the Cabinet Secretary about changes in work allocation that reduced their supervision of the digital systems. The three commissioners then met on September 9, their first meeting in four months.
None of this proves the Commission acted unlawfully. The Commission denies it, and, as far as the reports show, the two commissioners have not yet spoken publicly. But the burden has shifted. Two of three members of a constitutional body have said in writing that its name was used without its authority, and the Commission's reply addresses tone and volume rather than authority.
Three things should follow. The Commission should place the notings, minutes and communications on all 14 objections before the Supreme Court, which is already seized of SIR matters. The Court should examine that institutional record before accepting the Commission's explanation of its decision-making process. And the opposition's demand for the CEC's removal, which the Constitution reserves to Parliament under Article 324(5), should follow the record and not precede it. A commission that asks the country to trust its rolls cannot ask the country to take its own decision-making on faith.
