The way the Narendra Modi government and the Bharatiya Janata Party have shielded Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, making him insolently inaccessible to opposition parties and civil society, compels the nation to deal with this extraordinary crisis with a new imagination and creativity. While the unconstitutional shield renders Gyanesh Kumar more vulnerable, it makes the task of opposition parties more challenging. The unusual protests witnessed across the country over the past few days should be seen against this new backdrop.Why is the Chief Election Commissioner refusing to meet people who are opposed to the Modi government? This is for the first time the Election Commission of India has invoked protocol to meet opposition leaders. Gyanesh Kumar asked them to send designated representatives and set multiple conditions for the meeting. His reluctance to meet opposition leaders validates the perception that the commission has been integrated with the authoritarian network operating under the Modi-Shah duopoly.The commission did not hesitate to reveal that it was communicating with the police when approximately 300 lawmakers, including the Leader of Opposition and presidents of major political parties, were on the streets. As if the police can legitimately mediate between the commission and the major stakeholders of electoral democracy. This attitude shows that deleting 13 crore voters from the electoral rolls is not an isolated case of corruption. The commission is working to aid the authoritarian project of Hindutva forces. The largescale use of information technology to target Muslims, women and deprived communities suggests that Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is an attempt towards creating a technofascist state. The term is used to characterise a fascist state wherein the dictators are invisible, and technology runs the show. This makes authoritarian rulers disappear. The computer takes control of mundane affairs.This raises the fundamental question of how to resist such a regime. Can merely demanding Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation build adequate resistance against the regime?Can the rising heat on the streets affect the prime minister and the home minister? We have seen how the resignation of education minister Dharmendra Pradhan minimally affected them. There has been little change in the content and style of their functioning. The home minister skipped the entire parliament session because he did not want to respond to the issue of using pellet gun against the protesters. The judiciary also proved of little help. Modi could easily ask Gyanesh Kumar to leave. That would let them escape by sacrificing a minor player. The real challenge for protesters is building a strong resistance against the regime.Some political parties are obviously reluctant to demand the resignation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. However, the Communists and the Congress do not nurture any confusion. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge has already demanded dissolution of the Lok Sabha and state assemblies, saying that all the elections are illegal. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s articulation deserves attention for its innovative portrayal of the regime. He identifies it as a group of people who are allegedly conspiring against Indian democracy. He lists them as corporate (Gautam Adani), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (Mohan Bhagwat), state power (Prime Minister Narendra Modi, home minister Amit Shah, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval), and a constitutionally mandated autonomous institution (Gyanesh Kumar).Gyanesh Kumar has acted decisively to turn the Hindutva forces’ long-cherished dream into reality. They wanted the Indian polity to be structured in a way that Muslims should not have any voice: the Hindu Mahasabha and other Hindutva outfits have opposed universal suffrage. In the lead-up to the first general elections of free India, they demanded strict scrutiny of voters before registering them. This stems from V.D, Savarkar’s ideology. The RSS never abandoned its agenda of pushing minorities to the status of second-grade citizens. The Modi government was surreptitiously implementing the agenda with the help of Gyanesh Kumar.Prime Minister Modi’s ambivalent behaviour towards obeying the constitution gives a sense of what he is up to. The decision to control the ECI through appointments of Election Commissioners should not be seen as a simple attempt to gain an electoral advantage over opponents. It was a planned move to control the electoral process so as to suitably manufacture the mandate. He interpreted every election result as an endorsement from the masses. However, he sought legitimacy from religious institutions. We have seen how he installed Sengol, a sceptre of religious significance, in the Lok Sabha. This is a clear violation of the constitution, yet he did it pompously. Had the makers of the constitution imagined it? How could the prime minister of India trace his authority to an ancient religious symbol, an extra-constitutional source? Elections matter for him, but as a secondary source of legitimacy. The recent program of Aashirwaad ka Diya (lamp of blessing), and his performing aarati and havan in temples, make this clear.We must understand that the SIR and other distortions injected into the electoral process have colonial roots. The colonial masters never favoured universal suffrage and offered franchise to a limited number of people loyal to them. Eligibility was based on property ownership, tax-paying capacity, and education. The 1919 Act excluded women. After the Round Table Conferences, the British agreed to extend voting rights to women, but tied them to male guardians, usually husbands. In contrast, the independence struggle demanded universal suffrage from the beginning. The Nehru Report in 1928 and the Indian National Congress’s Karachi Resolution in 1931 clearly demanded universal adult suffrage irrespective of sex, wealth, or education.The communal organisations, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, never supported adult suffrage in its true spirit. If the League was apprehensive of so-called Hindu dominance and demanded protection and representation on religious grounds, the Hindu Mahasabha consistently campaigned against the so-called Muslim appeasement. It resisted every effort to extend protection and safeguards to minorities. The flawed understanding of society, religion and culture made them impervious to the democratic ideal of accommodation and inclusion. How could they think of real democracy?The SIR and the colonial enumeration processes share similarities. If we look at the list of documents required to gain entry into the electoral roll, these similarities become clear. Both the processes have property- and education-based eligibility. The ECI’s decision to drop Aadhaar at the initial stage raises suspicion that it wanted to block poor and homeless people from entering the list because it was the only document easily available to them. The higher deletion rate in metropolitan and urban areas reflects migrant workers’ inability to obtain residence or identity documents. The percentage of voters dropped in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata North has been 33, 35, 35 and 26, respectively.Also read: ECI Ignored Early Proposals to Make SIR Easier on Voters, Election Staff in Maharashtra: ReportHow the SIR targets Muslims hardly requires any explanation. The cases of organised deletions of Muslims from the voter list have been reported from across the country. The primary target has been residents of Muslim-dominated constituencies. Muslims have been targets of the Election Commission, as can be understood by its rhetoric on infiltrators. It has repeatedly spoken of weeding out infiltrators to purify the voter list. This is nothing but a reiteration of the language of the BJP and the RSS. However, nowhere, including Bihar and West Bengal, were such infiltrators found in any significant number. However, the rhetoric provided the basis for exclusion of Muslims from the voter list.Many people naively believe that the exclusion of Muslims from the voter list is a part of the BJP’s electoral calculation to exclude voters who would not vote for them. This is a simplistic analysis of a fascist plot. The main intention behind the whole exercise is to disenfranchise the community and reduce them to second-class citizens. This is part of the Hindutva project of making Muslims persona non grata in their own country.It must also be kept in mind that the SIR is not the only exercise directed towards the exclusion of Muslims. The regime has also implemented other offensive initiatives. Launching a mission on demographic changes is one of them. The constitution of the High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes coincides with the SIR processes. Prime minister Modi announced it on August 15, 2025, and the home minister constituted it on May 26, 2026, when most states across the nation were undergoing the SIR exercise. What it has been doing is to prepare the ground for rationalising the ouster of Muslims from the electoral rolls. The Committee is unconstitutional because it violates the right to live and settle where one chooses. It criminalises migration, particularly of Muslims.If we look at organised efforts to keep Muslims out of the electoral process through the use of Form 7, the connivance of the ECI and the ruling party becomes clear. There are stories of how BJP workers were allowed to file requests for deletions and Muslim voters had to suffer exclusion.Can fighting for the removal of a Chief Election Commissioner take on a techno-fascist regime? Can Gyanesh Kumar’s removal halt the exclusion of Muslims, women and deprived sections of society, the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and the backwards? Do the political parties need to recalibrate their strategy?Anil Sinha is a senior journalist.