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Snapshot of the day
October 5, 2026
Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan
If the time was ticking for Chief Commissioner Gynaesh Kumar, today’s observation by the Supreme Court brought little relief. The Election Commission has now been called out for its repeated lies, adding to the headache of the Modi government, which fortified routes leading to Nirvachan Sadan, where a delegation of former civil servants, activists and concerned citizens, including a former Delhi lieutenant governor and a former Union home secretary, sought an appointment with the EC to submit a “People’s Notice of Impeachment”. They were unable to reach the EC and later released the impeachment memo publicly.
Meanwhile, the EC, alongside the Modi government’s (in)famous PIB Fact Check, continues to practise what increasingly passes for official rebuttal in ‘New India’: lies, damned lies and fact-checks that themselves require fact-checking.
Even though the EC last week had said, in the wake of the Indian Express‘s explosive expose, that the Supreme Court upheld the declaration it ‘attached’ to Form 6, Chief Justice Surya Kant today clarified that the apex court never approved any modifications to the form. Back in July the EC was discovered to have added a compulsory declaration to the online version of its Form 6, which is meant to enroll new voters, asking applicants about their parents’ history with the SIR but evidently without a government notification or parliamentary oversight as required by the law. The Express‘s investigation revealed that a majority within the poll panel – commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi – were opposed to this, with the former calling the change outright illegal.
However, for now the apex court declined to pass any interim orders restraining CEC Kumar from functioning. It issued notice to the EC, the CEC, Sandhu, Joshi and the Union government among others.
Even as the apex court takes note of the mass disenfranchisement unleashed by the unconstitutional SIR of electoral rolls, it continues to remain largely silent on the issue. With the matter already before the SC, the Bombay High Court today declined to pass an urgent interim order staying the deletion of voters’ names in Maharashtra. Constitutional abdication at its best, anyone?
Over the weekend, the Delhi Police, which comes directly under home minister Amit Shah, continued its crackdown on protests demanding CEC Kumar’s resignation, detaining hundreds as demonstrators repeatedly attempted to reach Jantar Mantar. The street supplied some telling visuals. In one, a young woman reportedly made off with the ignition key of a bus carrying detained protesters, leaving police personnel to push the stranded ‘Bharat Travels’ vehicle away.
The visuals from yesterday’s protests are telling of the times where citizens are unafraid, the Modi government is frightened and CEC Kumar is now becoming a distinct liability.
A female journalist has alleged that a police officer squeezed her breasts when she was recording Left student leader Neha Bora’s detention on Saturday; two other women reporters came forward with sexual harassment allegations against the officer, Vivek Bhagat, pertaining to past incidents, according to the Cockroach Janta Party’s Ratna Singh. The journalist was detained when covering Sunday’s protests and then once again this morning when she and other reporters camped in front of the Parliament Street station for a second consecutive day demanding an FIR be lodged against Bhagat. The police force has not registered a case against him, and an officer claimed to The Hindu that there is no evidence against him. Also on Monday, Bhagat was assigned current duty charge of the additional deputy commissioner rank, though the Delhi government later put it on hold in view of Bhagat’s request to do so pending an inquiry into the allegations against him.
The police are also accused of beating detainees on Monday. At the same time there are allegations that some officers policed the protests without wearing their name tags; Bora’s All India Students’ Association has said that a group of cops not wearing their tags picked the student leader up on Sunday, placed her in an unmarked private car and drove off while her colleagues remained in the dark about her whereabouts. Amidst all this the Delhi police have issued a ‘guideline’ for journalists asking them to display their IDs at all times.
As with so many states in the country, now another case of applications – filed in bulk and apparently with mala fide intent – seeking Muslim electors’ deletion from the voter roll has surfaced in Telangana. S.V. Balachander, a booth-level agent affiliated with the BJP, filed around 31 Forms 7 seeking the deletion of Muslim persons living in a slum in Hyderabad’s Musheerabad constituency, including people who said have known him for years. Anjana Meenakshi reports that none of these individuals meet the criteria for deletion. Now an official inquiry has been initiated against the BJP BLA, who allegedly told the local Congress BLA that he was given the forms at the saffron party’s office and told to submit them.
‘No amount of whataboutery can justify mass disenfranchisement’, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has said amid the mounting SIR cotroversy.
The Delhi High Court has dismissed a plea seeking registration of an FIR against BJP leaders Kapil Mishra, Parvesh Verma and others over allegations
