On September 23, The Indian Express reported that two of the three Election Commissioners - Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi - had formally recorded objections and dissent notes at least 14 times over the past 10 months — on four occasions in a single day — over decisions and orders relating to the Special Intensive Revision and other operative matters.

The specifics are damning: the two Commissioners flagged the unilateral centralisation of the ERONET electoral database, unauthorised changes to Form 6 (the form new voters use to register), and, most importantly, the authorisation of appeals before West Bengal's tribunals that neither the state's Chief Electoral Officer nor the Commissioners themselves had sanctioned. Commissioner Sandhu specifically asked in writing who had filed roughly 16 lakh appeals on the Commission's behalf in West Bengal — and who authorised it.

Opposition Piles On
The reaction was instantaneous and ferocious. Congress branded the episode "Gyaneshgate" and renewed calls, first raised months ago, for CEC Gyanesh Kumar's impeachment. Rahul Gandhi went further, accusing the BJP, the RSS and the ECI of committing "an act of treason." Mamata Banerjee demanded Kumar's arrest and a repoll in West Bengal. DMK's M.K. Stalin, National Conference's Omar Abdullah, Shiv Sena (UBT)'s Uddhav Thackeray and Karnataka CM D.K. Shivakumar all joined the chorus, while the CPI and CPI(M) called for his resignation.

The Cockroach Janta Party announced nationwide protests from October 2 if Kumar doesn't step down.

The BJP, unsurprisingly, went into defence mode, with leaders dismissing the internal friction as "a reflection of pure democracy" and pointing out that a multi-member constitutional body is bound to generate internal notes and disagreements. Union Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal even asked how the Commission could be called biased when Congress had won in Kerala. LJP's Chirag Paswan struck a more measured note, saying the Commission owed the country a firm, transparent response regardless of what the Opposition says.

Two Clarifications, But Questions Unanswered
Here's the problem: the ECI has now issued two clarifications, and neither addresses the substance. The first simply asserted that all decisions on SIR "have been unanimous and with the approval of both the ECs and the CEC." The second, issued after an internal meeting, complete with a photograph of the three Commissioners together, repeated that the June 24, 2025, SIR order and subsequent phase-wise schedules were unanimously approved and upheld by the Supreme Court.

What it conspicuously did not do, was answer Sandhu's specific written question: who authorised the West Bengal tribunal appeals, and why didn't the state CEO know about it? This is a non-denial, not a rebuttal — and it leaves India's electoral machinery, the bedrock of its democracy, under a cloud precisely when public trust needed reassurance, not stonewalling.

What Should Be Done
Two things, in my view.

First: The ECI reports constitutionally to the President, not to the government of the day. If there is a genuine coordination or trust breakdown within a three-member body — and fourteen written dissents in ten months looks exactly like that — this is fundamentally an HR and governance problem that the President should step in to resolve, by convening the three Commissioners and getting to the bottom of it, rather than leaving it to competing press notes.

Second: The three Commissioners must meet the press together and answer specific, pointed questions — not vague reassurances about "unanimity." Anything less leaves the credibility of India's elections, and by extension its democracy, hanging in the air.

The 130-Million Number
Step back from the personalities, and the numbers alone justify the alarm. Adding up gross deletions across all three SIR phases — roughly 6.9 million in Bihar, 65.6 million in the twelve-state Phase 2, and 61.5-million-and-climbing in the ongoing Phase 3 — gets you to somewhere around 134 million struck off draft or final rolls nationwide.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has cited an even higher figure of 138 million, or roughly 14.6% of the pre-SIR electorate of 947.8 million. Former CEC S.Y. Quraishi has publicly questioned the scale, asking how many actual illegal migrants this crore-scale exercise has caught.

Break the numbers down by category and the picture gets murkier. Roughly 5.1 million deletions through Phase 2 were flagged as duplicate registrations — about 7% of the total — while "permanently shifted" or "absent" voters made up close to 50 million, the overwhelming bulk. That itself invites an obvious question the Commission hasn't satisfactorily answered: if millions of people have genuinely shifted from one state to another, shouldn't their names be showing up as fresh additions in the destination state's rolls?

Instead, deletions are piling up in outward-migration states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and equally in industrialised, in-migration states like Maharashtra, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu — states that should, logically, be gaining voters, not losing them. If a person moved and re-registered elsewhere, that's a duplication, not two separate, unlinked deletions. And tellingly, Phase 3 data shows even more names being parked under "Shifted" or "Absent" than in Phase 2 — categories that, unlike "deceased" or "duplicate," leave no independent paper trail to verify against.

West Bengal’s Work In Progress
Nowhere are the stakes clearer than West Bengal, where roughly 908.3 million voters were ultimately deleted, including 271.6 million struck off after adjudication of "doubtful" cases. The Supreme Court ruled that these voters, if genuine, could vote in later elections and put a cut off date. Essentially it created a work in progress voter, similar to WIP stock/goods. If ECI started an exercise it was its responsibility to finish it before polls, if it couldn’t poll dates should have been extended. It was a ridiculous decision in my opinion.

Around 2.2 million of the deleted voters — roughly 82% — filed appeals before special tribunals. Former CEC O.P. Rawat pointed out that of the cases the tribunals have actually decided, a striking 93% of the deleted names turned out to be genuine voters wrongly excluded — which he called "criminal negligence" demanding immediate remedial action or a halt to SIR. Yet at the current disposal rate, courts and lawyers have separately estimated the backlog could take anywhere from 12 to 21 years to clear. Meanwhile, the BJP's statewide margin over the TMC in the just-concluded Assembly election was roughly 3.1 million votes.

Whatever one's politics, that arithmetic alone should worry anyone who cares about the sanctity of the ballot. The ECI's credibility, and with it, public faith in Indian elections, cannot survive on press notes claiming "unanimity" while the substantive questions go unanswered.