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Snapshot of the day
October 7, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.
Is the “avatar of Vishnu” – aka Prime Minister Narendra Modi – afraid of the widening nation-wide anti-establishment protests seeking electoral reforms and resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gynaesh Kumar? Even as he is complimented by his fawning cabinet – headed by himself – for completing 25 years in public life, the designated protest site in the capital remains off-limits and, extraordinarily, the country’s Leader of Opposition is detained yet again by the Delhi police, for a second consecutive day.
Following a lunch with INDIA bloc MPs in a heavily barricaded Lutyens’ Delhi this afternoon, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi moved to Jantar Mantar Road to begin a flash demonstration; sure enough security personnel forcibly stopped the buses carrying him and other opposition leaders before they could reach the protest site, following which they went ahead by foot. He was finally detained late into the evening and taken to the Barakhamba police station before being released.
As for CEC Kumar, it appears we won’t be seeing him in public anytime soon. He was scheduled to travel to Chhattisgarh today and tomorrow, but the EC has cancelled his visit citing “unavoidable” circumstances.
If Maharashtra’s electoral authorities had themselves attempted to ‘map’ voters and their relatives to the benchmark 2002 rolls before formally beginning the SIR, then why were electors asked to map themselves again on their enumeration forms? The state’s chief electoral officer S. Chockalingam actually flagged this to Nirvachan Sadan and suggested that mapping details be pre-printed on enumeration forms wherever no ‘logical discrepancy’ is detected, so that citizens and booth-level officers have one less hoop to jump through – but the EC didn’t effect such a change, reveals Anubhuti Vishnoi. She also reports that the CEOs of several states greenlit relaxed SIR procedures on the ground amid the EC’s unresponsiveness.
Four Murshidabad men have been lodged in a detention centre in Chhattisgarh for a month now because the authorities there suspect they are undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh. They were deleted from the voter rolls during the Bengal SIR but have appeals pending before the state’s special tribunals. This has led Calcutta high court Justice Krishna Rao to pointedly ask what the point of the tribunals is if the authorities are going to make their own determination as to the men’s citizenship. “You are playing with people,” he said orally. Senjuti Sengupta reports that two of the four men have immediate relatives who did appear on the post-SIR rolls.
On the hot seat over its move to reject the Form 8 submissions by a Goa family during the SIR there, the EC has now asked the Bombay high court’s circuit bench in Panaji to defer its hearing of the matter because the Supreme Court is seized of petitions against the SIR. The Goa bench should follow the Uttarakhand and Sikkim high courts in putting this case on ice until the apex court hears the matters before it, the poll panel argued. But the high court refused. “At
