A walking moral hazard

 

After the 2024 Parliamentary elections, I’d written this blog: 

https://b-b-dash.blogspot.com/2024/06/dial-m-for-murder-of-democracy.html

 

That time, I actually thought, the Election Commission of India (ECI) couldn’t sink any further. I was proven wrong. It’s as though each Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) is trying to outdo his predecessor in terms of how low he can go.

 

In a huge country like India, elections have always had problems – booth capture, wanton violence, rigging of electoral rolls, rigging during polling and counting, bahubalis and so on. However, hardly anyone questioned the verdict because everyone felt that given the complexities and the problems, ECI had done its very best. Now, everyone feels that ECI has been doing its very best just to favour a particular party, credibility be damned.

 

The mind boggles at how much just one man, Gyanesh Kumar has achieved in just one and a half years (since 19.2.2025). And, how blatant he has been. Amidst all the din from the politicians, journalists, twitterati, a few things are clear.

 

Gyanesh Kumar treats the Election Commission as a tiny cell in a corner of the PMO and he is the bada babu, i.e., the Section Officer. The other two election commissioners are a mere formality to keep up appearances and pose for photo-ops. By ECI’s own reply to RTI queries, ECI didn’t decide on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls. So, obviously Gyanesh was following orders from outside ECI. In which case, his continuance as CEC is untenable.

 

Once Imran Khan told Allan Border “AB, give me Sunil Gavaskar and Chandra Shekhar from India, we will beat Australia". Allan Border retorted and said, “Imran, just give me those two umpires from Pakistan and we will beat the whole world.” Similarly, with two veritable hench-people in the form of Seema Khanna and Manish Garg, Gyanesh Kumar didn’t need anyone else to decimate Indian democracy. In fact, Kim Jong Un, Putin and all dictators in the world might be lining up to avail the services of these two now, and Gyaneshji’s too.

 

As per the law, the Election Registration Officers (EROs, usually Sub-Divisional Magistrates) and when so delegated, Asst. EROs, are the sole authority to decide who will or will not be on the electoral rolls. This power cannot be usurped by higher authorities. What Seema Khanna did was, through her software architecture, centralise this in her own hands and illegally usurp the legal powers of the ERO. Thus, she and her minder/s (most likely Gyanesh Kumar), sitting in Delhi, decided who will be on the rolls or not. One bulwark against electoral manipulation by the ECI was the involvement of hundreds of EROs in the process and that decentralisation was the excuse trotted out by ECI earlier. That bulwark is gone and so is the excuse. Another feature she introduced was deleting names through a software for something called “logical discrepancy.” No one fully knows what are the parameters for identifying these discrepancies and what is the legal basis. This was also introduced suddenly in the middle of an SIR (Special Intensive Revision) in West Bengal without any prior information or transparency. 62 lakh voters who were earlier verified as genuine voters by EROs got suddenly red-flagged (27 lakhs eventually disenfranchised) and the appeals process is still going on for them long after the election has been over.

 

The jugalbandi of Gyanesh Kumar and Seema Khanna did another diabolical thing. They asked the voters to map their names to their parents’ in another SIR held about two decades back. The twist was, the records of those previous SIRs were in PDF files, booth-wise. Very few people remembered where the parents were voting two decades back and which constituency and which booth, both of which had undergone any number of changes. Then they had to trawl through thousands of names in list after PDF list to find out the parents’ names which may have been grossly misspelt also. If SIR was so important, the minimum the ECI should’ve ensured was making the names machine searchable – it’d have taken a few months but that should’ve been the precondition for launching this horrendous exercise. Not doing so was deliberate. So were the compressed timelines.

 

In West Bengal, the ECI itself has filed appeals against 16.1 lakh voters who were actually cleared by judicial officers in the SIR process. No one knows, least of all the other two commissioners, who filed these appeals and who authorized such filing. Most of these appeals are still pending.

 

These were obviously major policy issues with far-reaching consequences, not only for specific polls but for Indian democracy as well. It’s clear that two of the election commissioners were not in the loop and were objecting. Enter the other hench-person, Manish Garg. Seema Khanna’s work used to be supervised by Deputy Election Commissioner Sanjay Kumar. This oversight layer of Seema Khanna’s functioning was removed by Manish Garg unilaterally and behind the backs of the two dissenting election commissioners.

 

It is also quite clear that Gyanesh Kumar has been allergic to inclusion of gen Z voters in the electoral rolls. A regular annual Special Summary Revision (SSR) is supposed to enable people turning 18 and new voters to register. However, this was pending since 2024 till the aftermath of the Indian Express expose. When the other two commissioners pressed for it, Gyanesh Kumar sought legal opinion – a typical bureaucratic tactic to delay things. Even after the legal opinion was available, he kept it pending. This allergy actually seems directly proportional to Gen Z’s allergy towards the current dispensation and the correlation is difficult to ignore.

 

After doing all this, Gyanesh Kumar is reported to have proclaimed, ““Tiger zinda hai, dekha jeeta diya naa Bengal mein …” He has lied and lied and peddled half-truths dressed in unconscionable arrogance. After the Indian Express expose, ECI came out with a press release which said that changes to Form 6 (for applying to be registered as voter) were upheld by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court judgement was in May and the change to Form 6 came about in July – he should be tried for contempt of court. The guy has turned the election commission into a SIRcus. He must go. If the other two commissioners are now saying (or bullied into saying) that these decisions have been unanimous, the whole lot should go. Fairest possible election is the heartbeat of India’s democracy. Gyanesh Kumar is a walking moral hazard.