SC to hear plea seeking suspension of CEC Gyanesh Kumar next week

The Supreme Court will hear next week a PIL challenging CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s functioning and seeking his suspension. The petition alleges that some Election Commission decisions were taken without approval of the other two commissioners and seeks scrutiny of official records

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear next week a PIL seeking the suspension of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and challenging the manner in which the poll panel led by him allegedly took decisions without the approval of the other two Election Commissioners.

The matter was mentioned before a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana.

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Senior advocate Vikas Singh, who mentioned the matter, told the bench that under the statutory scheme, decisions of the multi-member Election Commission have to be unanimous or be taken by majority.

“The way the Election Commission is functioning, there is serious doubt over whether the decisions are unanimous,” he submitted.

“We will list this next week,” the CJI said.

The PIL, filed by Patna resident Rakesh Kumar Singh, has urged the top court to determine whether CEC Kumar has been individually exercising powers that legally belong to the Election Commission as a whole and, if so, declare such actions unauthorised and take appropriate legal action.

“Direct that respondent No. 3 (CEC) shall not exercise the functions of Chief Election Commissioner of India pending final hearing of the present petition; direct that during such period, the business of the Commission be transacted by the unanimous decision of respondent Nos. 4 (Sukhbir Singh Sandhu) and 5 (Vivek Joshi); and direct that any appointment to the resulting vacancy be made upon the recommendation of a Committee, including the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India,” the plea said.

“Respondent No. 3 ought to be suspended from functioning as Chief Election Commissioner of India, pending final hearing of the present petition, so as to restore the multi-member character of the Election Commission,” it said.

The plea comes against the backdrop of a report in The Indian Express which claimed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record at least 14 times over the past 10 months to decisions and orders concerning the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that they said were issued without their knowledge or recommendation.

The Election Commission, responding to the report, has said that differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberations in any institution and that its orders carry full legal sanction and follow established statutory procedures.

The petition has made the Union Law Ministry, the poll panel, CEC Kumar, Sandhu, Joshi and Maneesh Garg, a senior official of the poll panel, parties to the case.

“This petition concerns not the fortunes of any individual constitutional functionary, but the constitutional identity of the Election Commission of India itself. Article 324(1) of the Constitution does not vest the superintendence, direction and control of elections in an individual Chief Election Commissioner. It vests those powers in ‘a Commission’,” the plea said.

Referring to the constitutional scheme, the plea said it “deliberately separated membership of the Commission from the chairmanship of the Commission, and separated the chairmanship of the Commission from the Commission’s power”.

According to the petition, Sandhu and Joshi recorded at least 14 objections between October 2025 and August 2026 concerning various actions attributed to the Election Commission.

The objections relate to communications allegedly issued in the name of the Commission without its approval, the absence of agendas and minutes of meetings, changes to statutory Form-6, access to and control of the ERONet/ECINet electoral-roll database, changes in IT-related work allocation, and appeals filed in the name of the Election Commission before West Bengal appellate tribunals, it said.

“Declare that the powers vested under Article 324 of the Constitution are constitutionally required to be exercised by the ECI as a multi-member collegial body…, and that no communication, order, direction, appeal or other act may be issued or represented as an act of the Election Commission save pursuant to a decision of the Commission taken unanimously or, upon disagreement, by majority…,” the plea said.

The petition relied on written objections recorded by the two Election Commissioners and said the underlying allegations should not be treated as conclusively established merely on the basis of media reports.

The plea urged the court to call for the Commission’s primary records, including minutes, agendas, approval sheets, file notings, work-allocation orders, IT-access records, server logs and database-change histories.

One of the issues raised concerns the alteration of Form-6, the statutory form used for electoral-roll registration.

The petition submitted that Joshi recorded an objection on May 16, 2026, stating that the form could not lawfully be altered to require additional SIR-related disclosures without an amendment to the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.

Sandhu is stated to have concurred with the objection on May 19, it added.

The petition also referred to concerns recorded by Joshi regarding the gradual centralisation of the electoral-roll database and sought an independent audit of database access credentials.

It further referred to objections concerning access by field-level statutory officers to the ECINet system.

“Direct Respondent Nos. 2 and 3 (Election Commission and the CEC) to preserve, without alteration, deletion, destruction, overwriting or archival, all physical and electronic records relevant to the present petition, including minutes, agendas, file notings, approval sheets, correspondence…,” it said.

The plea also referred to the filing of appeals in the name of the Election Commission before appellate tribunals in West Bengal.

It further referred to an alleged objection by Sandhu seeking to know who authorised such appeals and under what authority.

The petition urged the court to examine the legality of the disputed Form-6 alteration and certain IT work-allocation measures and, subject to the records produced before it, the authorisation of the West Bengal appeals.