Contrary to what its present working style suggests, the Election Commission is not a one-man body. Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in the Election Commission, and not in the Chief Election Commissioner personally. If the Chief Election Commissioner believes or acts as if the other Commissioners are decorative, it is an act of constitutional violation. Under Article 324(5), the CEC can be removed only like a Supreme Court judge, but the other Commissioners can be removed only on the CEC’s recommendation. The two who have dissented are therefore exactly the two who can be removed by the man they are dissenting against. The Election Commission’s public response to the Indian Express findings was that all decisions were unanimous. That claim appears to be at loggerheads with 14 written objections copied to the CEC. These objections were written by the Commissioners themselves, and were not manufactured by the opposition.

If the objections are indeed baseless, there is a simple remedy. The ECI should publish the file notes, open the software access logs and let the record show who authorised the centralisation of the voter database in Delhi when state officials were bypassed. ECI appears to be asking for one-sided blind trust, and if an institution demands trust without showing records, it is simply demanding deference.

The Special Intensive Revision is where this unaccountability reaches the voter. Rajnath Singh says that the Supreme Court upheld SIR. The Court did decline to halt the Bihar exercise, but it also had to correct the Commission in the process. It directed the publication of the names of roughly 65 lakh excluded electors with individual reasons, because “people have a right to know”. It directed that Aadhaar be accepted as proof of identity for those seeking inclusion, because insisting on a narrower document set was blocking legitimate voters. It is safe to say that this exercise is a legally contested one which has been judicially patched. It is anything but “legally right and administratively justified” in the plain sense that Singh calls it.

Then there is the question the government has been escaping from. The SIR was sold to the people as a purge of “ineligibles,” basically a euphemism that everyone understood. The Supreme Court explicitly said that the Election Commission cannot decide citizenship and directed that such cases be referred to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act. However, an RTI query to the Ministry of Home Affairs found that the Ministry itself does not appear to know which authority is competent to adjudicate these cases. Nothing appears to have been done to follow the Court’s direction. If we look beyond the stated purpose of this exercise, what remains is deletion. Deletion of the poor, the migrant, the illiterate, the recently married woman whose name has not yet moved to her husband’s household roll. Rajnath Singh does not care to address this. He prefers to collapse all criticism into the EVM debate, where the Supreme Court did not uphold the objections against EVMs. Despite that, several pertinent questions regarding the EVMs still remain in the minds of people, therefore a re-examination of several important issues regarding the EVMs is still a legitimate concern that should be addressed at the earliest. We reinstate our demand that there should be a provision for cent percent VVPAT tallying. The fact that this simple demand is not being accepted, raises serious doubts on the integrity of the process, which includes the machines. Our primary objection is still the removal of people from the roll by a process that vehemently resists transparency at every step. It cannot be ignored.

The centrepiece of Singh’s article is his claim that the government “institutionalised” the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner. The history, however, begs to differ from him. In March 2023, the Supreme Court prescribed a selection panel of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India, to hold until Parliament legislated. Within months, and amidst the suspension of opposition MPs, the Parliament legislated by dropping the Chief Justice and adding a Union Cabinet minister. The effective panel gets a built-in two-to-one executive majority. The Leader of the Opposition can dissent, and the dissent will be outvoted. Miles away from any institutionalisation, this was just a capture of the process with a statutory coat of paint. Singh says that his government respected the verdict striking down the NJAC. What he is conveniently avoiding is the fact that his government also overrode the Supreme Court’s direction on the selection panel within months.

Then comes the question of immunity. Section 16 of the 2023 Act says, in terms, that “no Court shall entertain or continue any civil or criminal proceedings against any person who is or was a Chief Election Commissioner or an Election Commissioner for any act, thing or word, committed, done or spoken by him when, or in the course of acting or purporting to act in the discharge of his official duty or function”. The protection is not limited to the term of office but the officer also gets to carry it after retirement. Even the President of India’s immunity under Article 361 is only effective in office! This means that an Election Commissioner now has a more durable legal shield than the head of state. No government needs to give a lifelong armour to an honest umpire. It gives it to an umpire that it expects to use. If the Election Commission is in fact so clean, then who is this immunity protecting?

In a display of selective constitutional history, Rajnath Singh cites the First Amendment and the Emergency. Then too, the communist movement, through A K Gopalan among others, opposed the First Amendment in Parliament, and the CPI(M) opposed the Emergency-era amendments, both in the Parliament, and in the streets. Thousands of CPI(M) activists and leaders were jailed during the Emergency, we do not need his reminders. But, the Congress’s record does not answer the most pertinent question of the present.

On the farm laws he says the government listened and repealed. The laws themselves had been passed in the Rajya Sabha by voice vote in September 2020, over a demand for division, when eight members were suspended. What he forgot to mention was the fact that the repeal came after a year of struggle on the roads, after the death of more than 700 farmers, after barbed wire, trenches and tear gas on the Haryana border. The government was still made to retreat under pressure from the very kind of dissent that Singh now files under anarchy.

On October 2, 2026, prohibitory orders under Section 163 BNSS covered New Delhi district. Metro stations were closed. Thousands of people were detained, including opposition leaders and journalists. The Supreme Court had to intervene to direct that peaceful protesters cannot be illegally detained, that the Metro should run normally, and that the area of the prohibitory order not be treated as a licence to pick up people.  However, on October 10, we all witnessed a political ban on assembling that was dressed up as a law-and-order measure, also in clear violation of Supreme Court’s previous day guidelines. Contrary to the law-and-order scare being created by the government, no violence by protesters was reported on either day. The only violence witnessed was in the act of detentions. The demand of the people was the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner who was also accused by his own colleagues of unconstitutional functioning. The government’s answer to this constitutional demand was barricades.

The geography of protest spaces has been shrinking over the years. The Boat Club was closed in 1993 and demonstrations were pushed to Jantar Mantar. Until the Covid lockdown, the customary protest march route ran from Mandi House to Parliament Street. Since then, permissions have been immensely scarce. Ten-day advance applications are now apparently the rule. The Supreme Court recognised peaceful protest as a fundamental right in the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan case in 2018 and affirmed the principle in the Ramlila Maidan case in 2012. But is it really a right if it requires the government’s permission ten days in advance, that too in a space that the government can close at will? Freedom of assembly without access to space is just an empty clause, a jumla like many others that the current regime propagates.

In his article, Singh also invokes Ambedkar. Before invoking Ambedkar, he should have read the whole speech. Ambedkar’s warning against unconstitutional methods assumed that constitutional methods remain open. People have access to courts that hear, to an umpire that is impartial, to a street where one may assemble. But when the umpire is chosen by the executive, shielded from suit, and the street is barricaded, that premise has already failed. Ambedkar also told the Constituent Assembly that we were entering a life of contradictions where political equality exists with social and economic inequality. A roll that deletes the poor, the migrant and the newly married woman is that contradiction at work. BJP-RSS may keep shouting at the top of their volume, it won’t change the fact that the demand for resignation is not an invitation to anarchy, but merely a demand for constitutional government.

The Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, has to resign, or the process for his removal should begin, with a court-monitored inquiry. The 2023 Act should be amended to restore a selection panel that is not structurally tilted toward the executive, and to delete Section 16. The SIR deletion data should be published, with a functioning adjudication mechanism before any name is struck off. Jantar Mantar and the Parliament Street route should be reopened, and blanket Section 163 orders should end. These are the minimum conditions for a contest in which the loser can accept the result. If the government cannot meet them, it should say so plainly, instead of writing columns about post-truth while its election machinery writes the file notes that give the phrase its meaning.