‘Invisible hand’: Opp questions ECI after report on commissioners’ SIR concerns

Opposition leaders have raised questions about the Election Commission of India (ECI) after an investigation by the Indian Express (IE) revealed that two out of the three election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, raised concerns over issues with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll. Sandhu and Joshi lodged objections at least 14 times over ten months, four of these objections in a single day, without being informed of the decisions made by the ECI.

The IE reported that the main disputes revolved around changes to Form 6, which required new voters to declare if a parent or grandparent appeared on the last SIR roll, a move the commissioners deemed unauthorized and potentially harmful to first-time voters. The SIR began in June of the previous year across the country to eliminate fake, duplicate, and ineligible voters, including those who were deceased or immigrants without legal status.

The Opposition accused the SIR of being a strategic voter roll clean-up exercise to favor the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), citing the ECI's lack of transparency and the perceived arbitrary nature of decisions made without unanimous or majority agreement. Congress leader Manish Tewari suggested that if the reported facts are accurate, it signals the presence of an 'invisible hand' controlling the ECI, potentially leading to impeachment proceedings.

However, the larger concern is about restoring the credibility of the ECI. In April, the Rajya Sabha Chairman and Lok Sabha Speaker dismissed the Opposition's notice for the chief election commissioner's dismissal, citing alleged partisan conduct and obstruction of electoral fraud investigations. Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut pointed out that decisions were made while the majority of the commissioners were unaware, and the AAP accused his party of mysterious voter deletions during the 2025 Delhi assembly election.

The commissioners also expressed concerns over centralized ERONet access, which they claimed threatened the integrity of the electoral roll. For instance, in West Bengal, nearly nine million voters were deleted from the electoral roll, with a significant portion categorized as logical discrepancies. The BJP's victory in the state was attributed, at least in part, to these deletions, a claim the party rejected.