A formal request was submitted to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan by Election Commissioners Vivek Joshi and SS Sandhu, asking that the conduct of Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg be examined. Both letters, drafted independently during July, pointed to overlapping concerns about breaches of established procedure — specifically, allegations touching on the unauthorised removal of oversight arrangements governing the work of Seema Khanna, the Election Commission's Director General of IT.

Correspondence from Joshi and Sandhu contended that bypassing the established channel through which DG IT files were routed to a Deputy Election Commissioner amounted to a departure from accepted administrative practice on Garg's part. According to the two election commissioners, official documents had previously been directed through Khanna — an officer whose background includes hands-on familiarity with electoral procedures.

Those letters put forward the argument that eliminating the oversight layer in question — a decision attributed to Garg — posed a threat to the reliability of the voting process. The Election Commission subsequently clarified that its correspondence with Somanathan had no bearing on any policy position of the poll body or its IT wing, but concerned solely the conduct of an officer seconded to serve under its authority.

The clarification stated that the redistribution of duties ordered by Garg had not taken effect following directives from the two commissioners, and that IT division oversight by the Deputy Election Commissioner had never actually been withdrawn. Garg, for his part, maintained that the oversight arrangement had not been permanently removed, pointing to the commissioners' intervention as the reason.

A transfer placing Kumar back within his home cadre took effect in August. According to a broadcast news outlet, file routing duties in that process are currently carried out by Maneesh Garg personally.

The complaints were passed along to the Department of Personnel and Training by Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan. Those letters were handled as internal notifications rather than formal appeals for intervention, a distinction that left the Election Commission's operational autonomy undisturbed.

In a meeting with the two Election Commissioners, Garg clarified that seniority — with Khanna holding a higher standing than Kumar — had played no part in shaping the move. According to Election Commission officials, Khanna moved up from a grade-14 position to a grade-15 post at some point during the current year. People who worked alongside her at the National Informatics Centre described her as a capable professional who played a role in rolling out the government's in-house email platform.

Questions raised about Seema Khanna's oversight of ECINet — the electoral roll platform operated under the Election Commission of India's IT division — centre on whether its centralised architecture leaves Electoral Registration Officers unable to exercise the powers assigned to them by statute. An episode in Goa, where 97 voters were found to have been left off the electoral roll, brought wider scrutiny to bear on who holds access to the voter database and under what conditions.