India’s opposition is pressing for the removal of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, after leaked internal emails published in September showed him running the Election Commission largely on his own, shutting out its two other members.
The Indian Express, working from emails obtained through confidential sources, laid out the rift in an investigation published in September. The commission’s two other members, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had put their objections on record at least 14 times over 10 months, and in one email complained that they learned of an important decision only through news reports.
The complaints covered the handling of requests to strike voters from the rolls, personnel appointments made without the commissioners’ approval and a centralization of power that took the authority to update electoral rolls away from regional officers.
The findings landed on ground that had already been fought over. Opposition parties have accused the commission for two years of treating the governing Bharatiya Janata Party leniently: it took no action over speeches by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other party leaders that critics called objectionable, and when regional parties broke apart it promptly recognized the breakaway factions of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra and of the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, awarding them the parent parties’ names and symbols.
The gravest charge, though, concerns the special intensive revision, the commission’s nationwide updating of the electoral rolls, which the opposition — as well as an earlier rews report — has described as a machinery for deleting voters in mass.
India’s three election commissioners hold equal rank, and decisions are normally made unanimously or with the chief carrying his colleagues along, an arrangement meant to box in partisanship. For decades the body worked quietly and kept its distance from the government, a period that lasted more or less until the BJP came to power in 2014. In 2023 the government rewrote the appointments law: the three-member selection panel of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court lost its judge to a cabinet minister, handing the government control of the picks. By last year, surveys were finding that more than a quarter of Indians had lost trust in the commission, well above the level recorded in 2019.
The special intensive revision deepened the suspicion. Earlier roll revisions required voters to show only that they lived where they were registered; the new exercise asks people for documents in a way that resembles a citizenship test, though the commission has no mandate to decide citizenship. The revision began in Bihar in 2025 and ran under close Supreme Court supervision after objections from opposition parties and civil society groups. Long-settled residents were asked for extra proof, the commission at first declined many widely used identity cards and it was reluctant to release machine-readable data.
In West Bengal, about 2.7 million names on the existing rolls were removed, many of them in areas with large minority populations and opposition strength. A share of the deletions fell under a category the commission called logical discrepancy, in which a small change, even the spelling of a name, could erase a voter. Objections were filed in bulk by people affiliated with the BJP seeking to remove minority voters, according to accounts collected by Kashif Islam, a financial services professional, in The Kathmandu Post on Sunday.
The same pattern appeared in other states where the revision ran. By the most recent count, nearly 130 million names had been struck from the rolls across India, an unknown number of them eligible voters. There was a widespread belief that the commission was acting at the government’s direction; the government, for its part, defended the revision at every stage as necessary to remove undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.
The opposition leader Rahul Gandhi spent much of 2025 making detailed presentations on what he called vote chori, unusual additions and deletions in the rolls of particular constituencies. The commission dismissed the allegations each time. Now opposition parties are demanding Mr. Kumar’s removal and a rollback of the revision, demands the government is unlikely to accept, and the Cockroach Janta Party, the Gen Z-led group whose street protests helped force out an education minister, has promised a nationwide agitation over the issue.
Whether the pressure holds, Mr. Islam wrote in his column, will turn on the opposition’s ability to unite and to bring ordinary voters into the fight. The government, he said, will hope the storm passes on its own.