This week, it was reported that two of the three members of the Election Commission had objected on record at least 14 times in 10 months to decisions Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had taken without their knowledge. We, in the Congress, are not surprised by the Indian Express report.
Rather, we told you so. We did not tell you explicitly that there is dissent internally in the Election Commission. But we told you that there is something eerily fishy and suspect with the commission. It is so dubious that two of their own could bear it no longer.
Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi told you in February 2025—when the voter list of Maharashtra suddenly swelled up by 40 lakh in just five months and, miraculously, all these new voters seemed to have voted for the BJP alliance—that this defies arithmetic and something is fishy. He even showed specific cases of constituencies such as Shirdi and Kamthi where tens of thousands of previously non-resident voters suddenly showed up on polling day with their IDs to vote for the BJP.
We wrote six times to the EC asking for machine-readable voter lists of Maharashtra to be able to analyse and compare them. We only received abuse in return. We plodded alone.
A large team of data analysts combed through by hand a seven-foot pile of voter lists of just one Assembly constituency— Mahadevapura in Bengaluru. We found more than one lakh suspicious voters, with 80 voters registered in one house and 60 in one ‘brewery’. The BJP won this constituency by 1,14,046 votes and, with this lead, won the overall Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat. Rahul Gandhi demonstrated this in August 2025. The Election Commission was still nonchalant.
Undeterred, in September 2025, Rahul Gandhi brought in actual voters from a rural constituency called Aland in Karnataka all the way to Delhi to narrate personal experiences of how a BJP worker had impersonated an Election Commission official and attempted to delete more than 6,000 Congress voters from the rolls. He was caught and a criminal investigation is under way, but the commission has refused to cooperate and share details of who logged into the voter software to delete these records.
Then, in November 2025, Rahul Gandhi showed over 25 lakh dubious voters in the Haryana voter rolls—including a Brazilian model whose face was registered with 22 different voter IDs! The BJP won Haryana, surprising all pollsters and even some of its own ministers.
The Election Commission’s answer to all this was not an investigation, but a plot to wipe the fingerprints of the crime. This operation was even given an ironic title—SIR, Special Intensive Revision, starting with Bihar.
After this SIR, Bihar’s voter rolls shrunk by 26 lakh from the 2024 Lok Sabha election. But shockingly, 66 lakh more people voted in the state election. Let that sink in—fewer voters registered on the rolls, but bizarrely, more voters came out to vote in the Bihar state election vis-à-vis the Lok Sabha election. Lo and behold, the BJP won Bihar defying expectations.
The secret sauce is an arcanely-named Form 6 and a voter database software. That gives full control to the Election Commission of India to add and shift voters at will. Technically, all adult citizens have the right to enrol as a voter by filling Form 6. After the youth backlash and sensing that Gen Z has moved away from the BJP, obedient servant Gyanesh Kumar changed the Registration of Electors Rules to ask for details of an applicant’s parents and grandparents. Just to make it difficult for first-time voters to enrol since they are not going to vote for the BJP.
So, what’s the latest brouhaha? Exactly this. The two dutiful Election Commissioners objected to this change in Form 6 rules, but they were ignored anyways by Gyanesh Kumar. Next, they objected to “centralisation” of the electoral roll database software, with all other commission officials denied access so that it can be operated secretly. Third, they objected to arbitrary deletions of voters and improper conduct of internal meetings.
See the pattern. The Form 6 objection by the two commissioners is exactly what Rahul Gandhi had flagged as mysterious new voters in Maharashtra and Karnataka’s Mahadevapura. The objection to arbitrary deletions is what Rahul Gandhi exposed in Aland. A centralised database that local officers cannot fully see is exactly what Aland’s out-of-state phones and machine-speed filings pointed to. The two commissioners may not have used the words ‘vote chori’. They did not need to. Their notes describe the machinery.
The Election Commission is a multi-member body so that no single individual controls the voter list of a hundred crore Indians. The Modi government’s 2023 law had already replaced the Chief Justice of India with a Union minister on the selection panel and shielded commissioners from legal proceedings. The Indian Express report revealed the next step: a Chief Election Commissioner who acts alone while his two colleagues learn of decisions after they are made.
To be clear, India’s voter lists are riddled with ghosts, fakes and duplicates—they need to be cleaned and purified. Voter lists are the aadhaar (foundation) of any democracy. The simple solution to this has been staring us in the eye for every—use Aadhaar to eliminate duplicates and fake voters.
It is true that Aadhaar does not imply citizenship and only Indian citizens must be allowed to vote. Every Aadhaar holder need not be a voter, but every voter must have an Aadhaar. So, to repeat a point I’ve made on this page earlier, Aadhaar can be used to eliminate a vast chunk of the current problem by asking every voter to link it with their voter ID. This is a simple and established process. Regardless of their views in the past, nearly all political parties now support using Aadhaar to clean voter lists.
Babasaheb Ambedkar called the electoral roll “a most fundamental thing in a democracy” and wanted the election machinery outside the Executive’s control. Two of the three people entrusted with that machinery have now told us that it is not even under the control of the commission.
Gyanesh Kumar is in a ‘kola hurry’ (raging hurry) to clean the fingerprints of past crimes of his bosses. The Congress and the nation’s youth are asking, “Why this, why this ‘kola hurry’ da?”
Praveen Chakravarty | Congress MP from Tamil Nadu
(Views are personal)
