Ashok Lavasa, a former election commissioner, told reporters on Tuesday that the Election Commission finding itself at the centre of repeated controversies had no real precedent, and called on the body to rebuild confidence among voters. He drew on a cricket parallel to illustrate his point, arguing that a team's win would face doubt in the public mind if the umpire's impartiality were called into question.
Opposition groups, acting in concert, have staged street demonstrations in the country's capital over recent days, at times coming into confrontation with law enforcement, as part of a broader push calling for the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and raising concerns about irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, including what they describe as "vote chori."
A broadcast outlet described as reputable had previously published an account in which Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi were said to have placed formal objections on the record no fewer than 14 times across a ten-month span, each instance centring on decisions and orders the two commissioners stated had been issued without their awareness. That period was one during which the full commission held supervisory responsibility over the nationwide rollout of the SIR.
Speaking at a citizens' convention in Kolkata via video link, Lavasa expressed the view that such a situation posed a threat to democratic functioning, drawing on the analogy of an umpire whose perceived partiality leads the public to question the legitimacy of election outcomes. He called on the Election Commission to rebuild its standing and restore public confidence.
He noted that the Election Commission of India, a body traditionally regarded as occupying a prominent place among public institutions, had become the subject of ongoing disputes, with members of the public gathering in protest.
Citing a report that pointed to internal disagreement among the three Election Commission members, Lavasa questioned how the public could determine whether any given decision had been reached by consensus or by a split vote if records of the commission's deliberations remained unavailable. He argued that this gap left open the question of whether rulings on matters such as the SIR had the backing of all members or only a portion of them.
Lavasa noted that the Election Commission had yet to put forward any response he considered definitive, adding that the press releases issued so far had left a number of points unaddressed and opened up further questions rather than resolving them.
Facing questions about internal disagreements between two of its commissioners regarding the SIR process, the Election Commission maintained that divergent viewpoints are a routine feature of deliberation within any institution, and that every order it issues carries full legal authority and adheres to the relevant statutory framework. The election body's published statement made clear that the authority to put forward recommendations for strengthening the voting framework extends beyond the three commissioners to encompass every member of staff within the organisation.
Citing the dispute around the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, Lavasa argued that voter-rights awareness among the public had reached a level not seen before the past 16 months, while separately noting that the Election Commission's move to carry out the SIR had caught most stakeholders off guard.
Pointing to the Election Commission's past practice of conducting special electoral-roll revisions under various names within the framework of the Representation of the People Act and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, Lavasa remarked that no comparable exercise had ever generated public anxiety on such a scale. He separately noted that dividing electors into three age-based categories according to their date of birth — a classification aligned with the Citizenship Act — represented a departure from anything the Commission had previously attempted, and observed that under Article 326 of the Constitution, the Election Commission carries a constitutional duty to register every person who meets the prescribed eligibility criteria.
He noted that Article 326 sets out voting eligibility for Indian citizens aged 18 and above who meet the mental capacity requirements and face no legal disqualification, adding that the approach taken on this occasion appeared, in his view, oriented toward keeping people out rather than bringing them in.
Lavasa noted that in the Special Intensive Revision conducted across West Bengal, voting rights for close to 60 lakh individuals were placed under adjudication — beyond those already dropped from the draft electoral rolls — and that the Election Commission did not address the concern that polls in the state were imminent, making resolution of all 60 lakh cases within the available timeframe unfeasible. He added that adjudication ultimately restored roughly 33 lakh names to the rolls, while contrasting the exercise's apparent orientation toward removing voters on the basis of suspected non-citizenship rather than established evidence with the broader enrolment approach that prevailed under India's first Chief Election Commissioner, Sukumar Sen, in the early 1950s.
At a gathering convened by CPI(M) figure Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya and former bureaucrat Jawhar Sircar, actor and activist Prakash Raj argued that the SIR posed a threat to democratic processes in the country. Raj contended that Assembly elections in Bengal were carried out in violation of proper procedure following the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, pointing to what he described as the targeted removal of voter names from those rolls and indicating that opposition to these practices had surfaced within the electoral system itself.
Raj argued that opposition parties had grown to view electoral contests as processes whose results were effectively decided in advance, and urged civil society to unite in response.
