The press note by the Election Commission of India, following the meeting of chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar and election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, along with subsequent instructions to state chief election officers (CEOs) on various issue, exposes serious illegalities and irregularities in its conduct. It is a damaging institutional admission that Indians who should not have been excluded were excluded, and the safeguards used to exclude them were either unlawful, defective or arbitrarily applied. More than being a belated clean-up operation which is now being presented as administrative responsiveness and rectification, this is evasion of accountability by Gyanesh for stripping eligible Indians of franchise. New re-enrolment drives and doorstep form collectionBy ordering every CEO, DEO and ERO to run a special enrolment drive for voters “left out during SIR or thereafter,” the ECI has conceded that exclusion of voters was not a mistake but a widespread design outcome of the process contrived by Gyanesh. In the least, it is an admission that the ECI under Gyanesh illegally disenfranchised citizens and needs to be held accountable for its actions. By telling officials to compare pre-SIR and post-SIR rolls, identify deleted voters, visit their homes and obtain Form 6 applications, the ECI now effectively admits that its deletion process did not distinguish between dead, duplicate or migrated voters and legitimate electors. If the process was sound, why must officials hunt for deleted voters, revisit homes, compare old and new rolls, and re-enrol citizens through a form designed for new applicants? They are Gyanesh’s confession that the machinery he ran was meant to strip eligible Indians of their vote.A voter should not have to be rediscovered by the state after the state has wrongly erased her. Even then, the burden of re-enrolment is being pushed on to the voter when it should be the responsibility of the ECI to automatically include them. The process continues to remain exclusionary in its intent even now.Also read: Day 2 of Anti-SIR Protest: Yogendra Yadav, Neha Bora Detained Amid Chants of ‘Gyanesh Kumar Murdabad’The right to vote cannot depend on whether a citizen survives a software flag, a paperwork hurdle, a discretionary hearing, or a subsequent rescue drive. The Constitution does not license the CEC to first disenfranchise citizens and then congratulate itself for offering them a route back by pushing the burden of re-enrolment on to those voters.Misuse of Form 6 for adding existing votersForm 6 is the statutory application for new registration, not a device to launder wrongful deletion of genuine voters. Making already eligible, previously enrolled voters apply afresh shifts the burden from the Election Commission, which removed them, to citizens, who must now prove their way back onto the roll. Instructions that regular Form 6 will now apply outside SIR acknowledges that past procedures initiated by Gyanesh violated administrative norms and statutory frameworks. Moreover, as noted by former CEC S.Y. Qureshi, Form 6 is legally meant only for first-time or new voters, and forces the illegally disenfranchised voters to commit a crime as they would misrepresent themselves as new applicants. Moreover, The case in Goa is the clearest indictment, where 97 voters were left off the final roll despite their inclusion having been recommended by the statutory field authorities. The Commission’s answer, of adding them after accepting Form 6 applications, neither cures the original illegality nor fix the illegality of deleting illegal citizens and compelling them to seek ‘new’ enrolment by signing a wrong affidavit.Unconstitutional modification of Form 6Form 6 is a statutory document prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. This was pointed out by the two election commissioners. Altering the online version of Form 6 on the ECINET portal, by adding mandatory declarations requiring first-time voters to map their lineage with earlier SIR rolls through themselves, parents or grandparents, without amending statutory rules under Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, is illegal and unauthorised. It illegally restricts voter registration beyond constitutional and statutory qualifications of age, citizenship and residence. The Commission has now said that outside SIR, the original Rules-prescribed Form 6 will be used.That is an implicit admission that an executive authority like the CEC cannot rewrite a statutory form by administrative improvisation. The claim that the Supreme Court upheld the SIR-linked declaration is misleading, and even if upheld by the judiciary, is not an answer to the rule-of-law objection. Judicial tolerance of a measure in a particular proceeding does not confer a general power on the CEC to amend delegated legislation without following the constitutional route.Usurping statutory authority via softwareUnder Section 13B of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, EROs possess the sole statutory authority to manage electoral rolls and are empowered to decide voter eligibility. In Goa, after EROs cleared 97 wrongfully flagged voters, the centralised ECINET software refused to provide a “rollback” option to restore them. This was despite eight warnings from the Goa CEO which were flagged by the two election commissioners. Disenfranchising legitimate voters through software control, Gyanesh and his chosen officials directly subverted statutory election laws. Announcing an IIT expert panel to double-check ECINET and restore role-based access to field officers confirms that the software previously operated without legal compliance or proper audit trails.Challenging judicial restoration of votersThe gravest disclosure is that 16.10 lakh appeals were filed against voters whom judicial officers had included in the rolls. The Supreme Court had removed the final stage concerning roughly 60 lakh voters flagged for logical discrepancies from the ECI’s hands and put it before judicial officers. But appeals were subsequently lodged by a centralised software in New Delhi seeking deletion of voters those judicial officers had restored. There is no clarity on who authorised the appeals, in whose name, and under what statutory power.Also read: Months After SIR and Assembly Polls, Election Commission Launches Special Drive for ‘Left Out’ VotersHow did the ECI’s centrally controlled digital system generate mass challenges to quasi-judicial determinations restoring citizens to the franchise? The authority for the appeals, the identity of the appellant, the grounds relied on, the approval trail is unknown – and the evidence is clear that each case was not individually assessed but initiated as a bulk deletion exercise. It is not some procedural quibble because a judicial officer’s order restoring an elector cannot be treated an administrative suggestion that a centralised ECI system casually relitigates at industrial scale. If Gyanesh used the ECI apparatus to pursue 16.10 lakh challenges after judicial inclusion, he inverted its constitutional purpose from a guarantor of the franchise into an institutional appellant against voters.Use of Form 7 as a deletion weapon by the BJPForm 7 may lawfully be used to object to an inclusion or seek deletion on specified grounds such as death, under-age registration, permanent shifting, duplicate enrolment or non-citizenship. It was weaponised into a tool for the targeted, mass purging of Muslim voters by the BJP across states. Party workers, directed by the party, filed thousands of digitally pre-filled, forged Form 7 applications without the knowledge or consent of affected electors, falsely classifying legitimate Muslim citizens as ‘shifted’ or ‘absent’. ECI machinery accepted these bulk objections without verifying signatures or serving mandatory notices to affected voters. It is a machinery of managed exclusion which is centralised at the top under Gyanesh and outsourced to the BJP on the ground.In Dhamnagar, Odisha, Form 7 applications seeking deletion of about 3,200 voters were reportedly uploaded during the SIR. More than 90 percent concerned Muslim voters—an extraordinary demographic concentration when the statewide average of Form 7-based deletions was only about 141 voters per Assembly constituency. Booth-level officers complained that their credentials and OTPs had been used without their knowledge to submit the deletion requests. A preliminary inquiry led the ECI to approve suspension and disciplinary proceedings against Santosh Kumar Nayak, the Dhamnagar Assistant Electoral Registration Officer, over allegations of unauthorised use of BLO credentials/OTPs and unauthorised submission or uploading of Form 7 applications.In Karnataka, statutory Form 10 records reportedly showed more than 4,000 Form 7 requests, most seeking removal of Muslim voters. In some cases, the objectors were not registered at the polling stations whose voters they sought to remove.In Babaleshwar, 1,363 of 1,373 applications—99.2 percent—were filed by just ten people; in Bhalki, more than 1,700 deletion requests were made by 30 people. Such patterns are plainly incompatible with the fiction that this was a spontaneous, voter-by-voter correction process.An FIR has now been registered in Belagavi against BJP leader Ravi Patil and others over allegations that 198 minority-community voters were targeted through Form 7 applications. These are allegations under investigation, not established guilt—but they are serious enough to have crossed the threshold for criminal inquiry.In Uttarakhand, an investigation reported that 1,657 of 4,099 Form 7 objections in one constituency were filed in the names of just 35 people, including 31 BJP BLA-2s; those named as applicants said their personal details and signatures had been fraudulently used. The voters targeted were predominantly Muslim.Not enrolling Gen ZThe Election Commission is rule-bound to include new voters each year in four windows, each needing to be announced appropriately. This comes under the Special Summary Revision or SSR. The CEC has illegally suspended SSR, since 2024, a point that fellow election commissioners had made on the record as an objection. To not allow for over-18s to register because an SIR is in progress added to friction between the Commission. The Economic Times has reported on how at least 16 states are directly impacted and have not seen any young voter enrolments. In the present political climate, this raises serious questions, apart from of course being in violation of the 1981 Delhi High Court judgement on the Ramakrishna Hegde case.Judicial onusUnder Gyanesh Kumar, the ECI has produced a perverse electoral order where citizens wrongly deleted must submit Form 6 to regain a vote they already possessed; judicially restored voters face centralised appeals seeking their removal; and Muslim voters can be targeted en masse through Form 7 filings enabled by the alleged misuse of the Commission’s own digital access. By bypassing dissenting Election Commissioners, disabling statutory ERO powers, ignoring widespread forgery and using central software to override judicial orders, Gyanesh converted a constitutional body into an active instrument of voter exclusion to favour the BJP.The ECI now wants credit for its corrective action, but its previous actions call for strict judicial intervention to fix Gyanesh’s accountability and award him punishment. Here is the sequence of action by the ECI:It imposed an exclusionary and illegal enrolment condition.It allowed eligible voters to disappear from final rolls.It was forced to acknowledge that even lawful eligibility could be overridden or defeated by control of ECI software at Delhi.It now sends officials door to door with Form 6 to repair the damage but again aggravates the illegality and pushes the burden on to the voters rather than being done by the ECI.It presents this step as administrative responsiveness when it is evasion of accountability for an unlawful deprivation of franchise to millions of Indians.Modi’s responsibilityThe appointment and operational framework under the Modi government have fostered an ecosystem where institutional independence is subordinated to executive control. The disenfranchisement of Muslim voters through administrative orders and centralised software is the direct byproduct of the Modi regime’s institutional capture. By endorsing opaque processes like SIR and bypassing legislative rule-making procedures, he has appointed people like Gyanesh to run a system that overrides statutory protections guaranteed to Indian voters. By restructuring ECI appointment rules to guarantee political control and backing opaque digital systems like ECINET, the Hindutva regime has enabled demographic engineering under the guise of electoral maintenance. In that sense, Gyanesh is only a symptom. If judicial responsibility to revive India’s constitutional democracy lies on the CJI, the political accountability for all the illegalities committed by Gyanesh against Indian citizens will end up directly at Modi’s door.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.