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Snapshot of the day
September 23, 2026
Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi
If past 24 hours have only reinforced the impression that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s cup of sins has now overflowed, with opposition parties across the country, including the Cockroach Janata Party, calling for a nationwide movement against him, the next 48 hours are going to be crucial, above everything else, for Indian Democracy.
Rahul Gandhi today demanded that Gyanesh Kumar resign and ‘turn approver’ – presumably by spilling the beans on the two men the Congress leader blamed for what he said was a ‘Vote Chori Conspiracy’ – Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
‘Jantar Mantar 2.0 will definitely happen if CEC Gyanesh Kumar doesn’t resign within 48 hours’, the CJP announced today at a press conference.
Meanwhile, Anubhuti Vishnoi of the Economic Times today has revealed further details of the dysfunction within the EC. Sandhu and Joshi, she reports, have been in favour of carrying out a special summary revision of the voter rolls – which have not happened at least since the Bihar SIR was launched – so that newly eligible electors can register themselves, but this exercise hasn’t happened anyway. CEC Kumar sought a legal opinion on whether an SSR ‘was needed’ amid the SIR, following which the two commissioners reiterated their stance in favour of resuming it. What that legal opinion said we do not know but the report raises the question of whether it is Kumar’s opinion that has precluded the exercise, which Vishnoi notes at the outset of her report involves the enfranchisement of India’s recalcitrant Gen Z.
She also suggests that the disagreements at the top of the EC have taken on a bitter character: the annual confidential reports of almost 50 election officials “have been held up as CEC and the two ECs could not sign on them together, as required”, she writes. The Express‘s Chopra had also reported yesterday that the trio met on September 9 this year after a four-month gap. It was roughly during this four-month period that Sandhu and Joshi raised some of their most serious concerns over the EC’s functioning, including over the ‘illegal’ change to Form 6, the ‘centralisation’ of the voter roll editing process, the poll panel’s appeals after the Bengal SIR and their writing to the cabinet secretary.
Coincidentally, Vishnoi says, she just received a notice under the SIR asking that she attend a hearing to prove her eligibility to remain on the voter rolls. She has taken the missive in her stride.
For its part the opposition is mulling a third attempt at an impeachment motion against Kumar and is considering submitting a notice to that effect within the next fortnight. On its first try, both the Lok Sabha speaker and the Rajya Sabha chairman rejected the notices submitted in their respective houses, while the opposition’s second notice, signed by 73 Rajya Sabha MPs, has been on ice since April. The Modi government’s law governing the
