New Delhi: In a counter-affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, the Election Commission (EC) and its three commissioners have sought to defend the various decisions taken within the poll body that have been thrust into the national spotlight by the Indian Express, including its move to alter the online version of Form 6 and file lakhs of objections against the registration of voters in Bengal.At the outset of the counter-affidavit filed on Monday (October 26) evening, deputy election commissioner Bhanu Prakash Yeturu said that the document stands approved “by a unanimous decision” of the trio – a declaration occurring in the wake of the Express revealing that commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected to or complained about being in the dark over some aspects of the contentious special intensive revision (SIR).The counter-affidavit, filed in response to a petition challenging the SIR and seeking action against chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, also asserts that the three orders effecting the respective phases of the revision exercise were issued “in accordance with decisions of the EC arrived at unanimously” and in compliance with the law.“All contentions to the contrary are erroneous and denied. The attempts to make aspersions against the EC is unfortunate,” the counter-affidavit seen by The Wire states.Referring to the alteration of Form 6, through which new electors are registered, the EC and the commissioners argued that the requirement to submit an appended declaration alongside the form during the SIR did not amount to emendation of the form itself, but acknowledged that a change to the online version of the form “could be construed as though an amendment … had been made”.“… There were certain steps taken by the officers to whom responsibilities had been assigned, which needed to be corrected to ensure that they are fully aligned with the steps approved by the Election Commission,” says the counter-affidavit. It is not clear who these officers are.Form 6 can only be amended by the Union government, it recalls. However it was reported in July this year that the online version of the form came to include within it a declaration asking applicants about the presence of their or their relatives’ entries in the past benchmark voter roll, even as no gazette notification effecting this change was published.Joshi and Sandhu appeared to object to this addition to the online Form 6, per an investigation by the Express‘s Ritika Chopra released last month. The latter commissioner, she reported, even called the addition of the declaration as “unauthorised” and “illegal”.This addition to the online form, the EC and the commissioners claimed in their counter-affidavit on Monday, was made so that applicants would not have to submit two OTPs – one for the form and one for a separate declaration – while submitting it. “This bonafide objective became a subject matter of deliberations and suggestions,” they said.Bengal deletionsChopra’s investigation also noted that Sandhu had said neither he nor Joshi nor West Bengal’s chief electoral officer (CEO) were aware of the basis on or process by which the EC filed appeals objecting to the inclusion of names on to the state’s electoral rolls during the SIR.Addressing this, the EC and the commissioners stated on Monday that “the said appeals have been filed by the officers of the office of the CEO, West Bengal, in their capacity as authorities under the RP [Representation of the People] Act”. These “matters were not brought to the commission,” they claimed.The Wire‘s Aparna Bhattacharya has reported that the EC has sought the removal of nearly half of those individuals whom the judicial officer-led ‘adjudication’ process greenlit for Bengal’s rolls during the state’s especially contentious SIR.As for Goa, where the Express said that the alleged centralisation of the EC’s intranet prevented election officials in the state from adding close to a hundred individuals back to the rolls despite writing to the commission multiple times, the counter-affidavit simply records efforts to re-enrol them through Form 6, even though that document is technically meant for first-time and not wrongly deleted voters.It also mentions Joshi and Sandhu’s decision to individually write to cabinet secretary T.V. Somanathan to complain about deputy election commissioner Maneesh Garg’s move to allegedly alter work allocation within the EC without keeping them in the loop. The two commissioners’ decision to set Garg’s action aside, the counter-affidavit says, means his “order … was never implemented”.“In the eyes of the law,” it goes on to argue, “a newspaper report is not treated as evidence of the facts it narrates. The commission has neither released nor authorised the release of any internal note/file to any news agency. A public interest petition built on such material calls for its conclusions to be examined with circumspection.”The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear the petition in which the counter-affidavit has been filed – in addition to several other tagged pleas – on Tuesday.Anger against the CEC and the SIR spilled out onto the streets in the wake of the Express‘s investigation, with protests led by the opposition and the Cockroach Janta Party attracting thousands of demonstrators to central Delhi over this past month. The Modi government has responded to the agitation by imposing prohibitory orders in the capital, detaining protesters but also journalists and lawyers, and deploying thousands of motley security personnel.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.