“This Is Criminal Conduct”: Mahua Moitra Registers Police Complaint Against CEC Gyanesh Kumar

Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mahua Moitra on Thursday filed a complaint against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar at the Parliament Street Police Station, seeking action over the alleged "criminal conduct" in the handling of electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.

The complaint came a day after The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had raised objections at least 14 times over 10 months on decisions related to the SIR process, including voter additions, deletions, restoration of names and changes to the voter registration system.

Speaking to reporters after filing the complaint, Moitra alleged that the Election Commission’s centralised IT systems allowed decisions on voter lists to be taken without adequate involvement of local officials responsible for maintaining electoral rolls.

“The Election Commission is made up of three Election Commissioners to maintain checks and balances. Majority decisions prevail. It has now been proven by the Indian Express investigative report yesterday that two of the three Election Commissioners, namely Mr Joshi and Mr Sandhu, dissented from Gyanesh Kumar's actions on 14 occasions in the last 10 months, and sometimes as many as four times in a single day,” she said.

“Very important things, such as the centralisation of the IT software, were left entirely in the hands of DG IT Seema Khanna, who was using this software to bypass local, on-ground officials,” Moitra added.

The TMC MP further questioned changes made to Form 6, the application used by first-time voters seeking registration on electoral rolls. She alleged that a new question asking applicants whether they or their parents or grandparents were linked to the previous SIR was added without amending the relevant rules.

“Mr Sandhu and Mr Joshi dissented and said that only by amending the rules could you do this; you cannot simply add a question,” Moitra said.

She alleged that the change affected voter registration and raised concerns about people whose names had been removed during the SIR process.

“Today, all over India, 13 crore voters have been deleted. What will happen to their children? What will happen to their children when they turn 18? They cannot get on the rolls either,” she said.

This comes after an Indian Express report revealed Sandhu and Joshi had objected to changes in Form 6, with the two commissioners reportedly stating that the statutory form could not be altered without amending the relevant rules. Sandhu later described the reported changes as “unauthorised and illegal” and called for their removal.

The Election Commission has said that written observations, internal notes and disagreements among commissioners are part of normal institutional discussions. It has maintained that official decisions issued by the Commission have legal validity and that final decisions, including those related to the SIR exercise, were taken unanimously.