The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) press note on Saturday, following revelations that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had recorded 14 objections to decisions under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, reads like damage control to manage perceptions. It concedes their complaints, but only administrative ones. Agenda will be circulated before meetings, and the minutes afterwards, while officers’ foreign trips will require the ECI’s approval. It also implicitly admits the flawed implementation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) are to launch a “special drive” to enrol anyone “whose name has got left out”. But there is no remorse for an exercise that struck lakhs of genuine electors off the rolls in West Bengal and has marauded from State to State. Those deleted are simply asked to reapply as though they were new applicants. There is no answer to Mr. Sandhu’s question on who authorised 16.1 lakh appeals to remove voters whom judicial officers had included in West Bengal.

India’s institutions have largely held, except in dark periods such as the Emergency, when an executive emboldened by legislative strength ran roughshod over the Constitution and a shamelessly permissive judiciary let it do so via ADM Jabalpur. The ECI under Mr. Kumar has overseen the removal of more than 13 crore names from draft rolls through the SIR which, as this daily has repeatedly argued, shifts the onus of enrolment from the state to the elector, deletes names before it verifies and imposes onerous conditions for re-entry. It got away with this because the Supreme Court declined for months to decide whether the exercise was constitutional. When it finally ruled on May 27, the SIR was already a settled fact in Bihar, West Bengal and other Phase 2 States. The judgment, reminiscent of ADM Jabalpur’s deference to the state, engaged the SIR in theory and not in practice. It read a provision for exceptional, targeted revisions as a licence for a State-wide sweep. While it assured voters already on the rolls that they were still presumed eligible, the SIR made them prove it all over again. And it brushed aside its 1995 ruling that every removal must be individually reasoned. Events since then indicate the damage done — over nine in 10 appeals decided by West Bengal’s tribunals have restored deleted voters months after the Assembly polls; and in one third of Delhi’s seats, the draft rolls have fewer electors than those who voted in 2025. The ECI’s press note changes very little. The ECI must be reconstituted by a selection committee that does not give the government an overriding majority. Anything less would be a travesty of institutional democracy.