6 min readMar 17, 2026 06:12 AM IST
First published on: Mar 17, 2026 at 06:12 AM IST
What more must the CEC do to deserve impeachment? I wondered as I read an editorial in this paper (‘Question CEC, but move to impeach is unwise’, IE, March 13) admonishing the Opposition for bringing an impeachment motion against Gyanesh Kumar, the CEC. While conceding that there was merit in accusations of political bias, intemperate behaviour and an ill-timed and shoddily executed SIR, the editorial warned that the Opposition was undermining itself and “risking a hardening of confrontation with a high-ranking constitutional authority” by “rushing to use an instrument of last resort to score only a symbolic point”.
So, I turned to the Constitution. Article 324 (5) lays down that the CEC can only be removed on the same ground and by following the same procedure as established for the removal of a judge of the Supreme Court. The procedure involves impeachment by Parliament on the ground of proven “misbehaviour or incapacity”. The Constitution does not tell us what kind of behaviour is expected of the Election Commissioners. Fortunately, the Supreme Court spelled it out in the famous case (Anoop Baranwal vs. Union of India) on the process for the appointment of the Election Commissioners. Writing the majority opinion, Justice K M Joseph formulated the normative standards expected of the Election Commissioners, standards that we must judge Gyanesh Kumar against: “Persons of integrity and independence who can command public confidence”, who are “capable of acting impartially”, who are “insulated from executive influence” and can “function without fear or favour”, possessing the “character and strength necessary to resist political pressures”.
This positive list must be supplemented by a negative list — some red lines that disqualify a person from holding the office of Election Commissioner. For that, I turned to the BJP, which so very eloquently put these principles while making a case — to my mind a fair case — against the appointment and continuation of Navin Chawla, first as the Election Commissioner and then as the Chief Election Commissioner. The norm invoked by the BJP’s memorandum to the President, dated April 8, 2006, are worth recalling: “The matter is not of legality but of propriety relating to his continuance”. BJP leader Jaswant Singh’s petition to the apex court spoke of “reasonable apprehension of bias, incompatible with the neutrality expected of an Election Commissioner”. Finally, in 2008, the then CEC, N Gopalaswami, wrote to the President seeking Chawla’s removal on the ground of “political partisanship” as his conduct did not give an “impression of political neutrality” raising “serious doubts about his political detachment”. In the end, Chawla was not removed, but the episode helps us set some norms.
Gyanesh Kumar’s conduct as CEC must be judged against these norms of what constitutes proven “misconduct and incapacity”. Now, misconduct cannot just be about how he conducts himself in public. Waving fingers at elected political leaders, waving his hands towards a non-existent public, political rhetoric at press conferences — all this is comic and outrageous. But in all fairness, pomposity is unbecoming, not unconstitutional. Again, his proven incapacity to offer cogent arguments — remember the “behen-beti ki photo” argument to deny CCTV footage — may not fall under the constitutional definition of “incapacity”. At any rate, if you were to bar small men from holding big offices (I like the Hindi expression — “joota bada hai, lekin paanv chhota”) a majority of constitutional offices would remain vacant.
The more serious point about Gyanesh Kumar’s “misconduct” is his blatant political partisanship. All you need to recall is his now-infamous press conference on “vote chori” where he exhorted the Leader of the Opposition to file an affidavit or offer an apology to the nation. All that was left thereafter was for him to claim a BJP ticket and himself contest elections. This was not a one-off incident. There have been umpteen such combative encounters, the latest with TMC leaders. The story of the SIR in West Bengal is a story of the Election Commission’s desperate attempts at mass deletion of voters inconvenient to the BJP. The decision to replace the chief secretary and home secretary of West Bengal again shows jugalbandi with the BJP. More than their opposition to the PM, if there is one thing that brings together the country’s opposition parties, it is their lack of trust in the CEC. The level of public trust in the Election Commission has been going down for a few years. But the credit of turning this once hallowed institution into a meme — latest gyan from Gyanesh Kumar — must go to the present CEC. If “propriety” and “impression of neutrality” are any consideration, Gyanesh Kumar has no business staying in the CEC’s office. In any functioning democracy, public shaming would have forced someone like him to resign by now.
Impropriety, partisanship, incompetence — bad as these are, such infractions fade into insignificance when compared to the SIR, Gyanesh Kumar’s biggest assault on the democracy he was meant to protect. The Supreme Court is yet to pronounce on the legal-technical issue of whether the Election Commission had the powers to do the kind of rewriting of rolls that it did in the name of the SIR. Whatever be that legal verdict, the substantial outcome of this exercise is for everyone to see. We know that about 5 crore names have already been deleted from the voters’ list, even as over one-third of the country is yet to go through this exercise. We know that in every single state, the SIR has shrunk the voters list as compared to the adult population of that state. We know that the SIR has caused the proportion of women in the voters’ list to fall in every case. We know that millions of marginalised Indians — the poor, migrants and nomadic communities — have lost the only effective right they had in independent India, the right to vote. We know that Gyanesh Kumar has single-handedly curated, without any precedent, consultation or preparation, the largest ever recorded disenfranchisement in the history of any democracy. This assault on the universality of adult franchise would put the American Jim Crow laws that disenfranchised Black people to shame. The move to impeach Gyanesh Kumar, even if it remains symbolic, is the beginning of an acknowledgment and redressal of this crime against “we the people”.
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal
