From Sukumar Sen to Gyanesh Kumar. What happened to the Election Commission

How a man built an Election Commission where the poorest Indian and the Prime Minister stood equal at the ballot box — and why the institution he founded is now facing questions over who gets counted, who gets deleted and who gets to decide, is the a question that keeps coming back.

In September 1951, India was preparing to do something that, on paper, appeared almost impossible.

The country had only recently emerged from Partition. Its cities and villages were poorly connected, millions had lost documents and homes in the upheaval, and 84 per cent of its prospective electorate could not read or write. Yet the new republic had decided that it would not wait for literacy, wealth or social privilege before giving its citizens the vote.

There were more than 173 million of them to find.

Sukumar Sen, India's first Chief Election Commissioner, wanted each one of them identified, registered and placed on an electoral roll before the country went to the polls. He would not hurry simply because Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru wanted the first general election by spring. Sen pushed it to autumn because the machinery did not yet exist. Infrastructure, personnel, training, ballot boxes, polling stations and, most fundamentally, the electoral rolls had to be built from scratch.

The first general election was eventually held between October 1951 and February 1952. But the work of making that election possible had begun months earlier, in September.

It was not merely an exercise in counting voters.

It was an exercise in making a citizen and making sure they count.

The significance of that is easy to lose in contemporary India, where the electoral roll can appear as a database entry, an EPIC number or a name on a screen. For Sen, it was the foundation of the republic's promise that the vote of an impoverished landless labourer would carry exactly the same weight as that of the Prime Minister.

That was the radical proposition embedded in India's universal adult franchise.

The colonial electoral system had been restricted by property, education and other qualifications. Independent India did not inherit that logic. It chose universal franchise from the beginning, irrespective of caste, religion, gender or wealth. Women did not have to wait for a later political settlement to acquire equal voting rights. India entered democracy with electoral equality already written into its constitutional imagination.

And Sen had to turn that promise into paperwork.

His officials went from house to house across an enormous country to prepare the rolls. The task became particularly complicated by social customs that made some women reluctant to disclose their names. In some parts of North India, women asked to be registered not by their own names but as someone's wife, daughter or mother. Sen refused to accept that convention. Entries without women's own names were struck off, resulting in nearly 2.8 million women being left out of the first rolls.

It was a harsh administrative decision, but it revealed the principle Sen was trying to establish: the voter had to exist in the electoral system as an individual citizen of India. The expectation was that the next rolls would correct the exclusion rather than preserve a practice in which women existed (electorally) only through their relationships to men.

The same insistence on making an unfamiliar electorate legible shaped almost every aspect of the first election.

With the majority of voters unable to read, political parties were represented through symbols drawn from everyday life. Sen introduced indelible ink to prevent impersonation. Mock polls were organised. Voter education was carried through newspapers, radio and even a documentary film shown in thousands of cinemas. Around two million ballot boxes were required for roughly 224,000 polling stations.

Sen travelled across states to inspect preparations.

The machinery was slow because it had to be.

It was painstaking because the electorate deserved nothing less.

That is perhaps the most consequential inheritance of Sukumar Sen: democracy was not to be made convenient or comfortable for the state. The state had to make itself capable of delivering democracy to the citizen.

The first election's success established processes that continued to shape India's electoral machinery for decades. Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has described Sen as the father of the ECI and argued that a substantial part of the system still bears the architecture he created.

Sen himself remained largely invisible. He avoided publicity and, according to accounts of his family, believed more in doing the work than talking about it. After India, he was asked to help establish an electoral system in Sudan, where many voters were also illiterate.

The institution he left behind, however, was never supposed to be invisible when its constitutional duty was at stake.

Article 324 placed the superintendence, direction and control of elections in the Election Commission. Electoral rolls were not a peripheral administrative exercise. They were the mechanism through which the constitutional promise of political equality became operational.

However seventy-five years after Sen began building the machinery, the central question facing the Election Commission is again the electoral roll — but now the dispute is not about how to find an electorate that has never been counted.

It is about how names are being added, deleted, restored and managed inside an increasingly centralised electoral system.

An investigation by The Indian Express has reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions they said were taken without their knowledge. Their objections concerned precisely the functions at the heart of the Commission's mandate: adding new voters, deleting and restoring names, appeals against roll decisions and the custody and security of electoral-roll data.

In one case, Sandhu described a change to Form 6 — the application through which a citizen applies to become a voter — as unauthorised and illegal. The change required new applicants to establish whether they or their parents or grandparents appeared in the electoral roll of the previous intensive revision. The two Election Commissioners had earlier recorded that the form could not be changed in that manner without an amendment to the relevant rules.

The dispute then moved beyond individual forms to the architecture of the electoral database itself.

The two Commissioners raised concerns over what they described as the gradual centralisation of electoral-roll management through ECINet, the Commission's digital platform. The concern was not simply technological. Under the existing legal framework, Electoral Registration Officers at the constituency level prepare the rolls, hear claims and objections and decide which names remain or are deleted.

In Goa, the consequences became concrete.

According to the investigation, 97 voters were found eligible by Electoral Registration Officers after producing documents and responding to the required process, but the centralised software did not allow those decisions to be recorded. The dispute over the system thus became a question about something far more basic: whether a statutory officer on the ground could actually perform the function assigned to that officer by law.

This is where the distance between Sen's India and today's ECI becomes disappointingly distinct.

Sen's problem was that millions of citizens were difficult to reach.

Today's problem, according to the two Commissioners' objections, is whether the system built to record those citizens is becoming too centralised for the officials legally responsible for maintaining it to exercise their functions independently.

The scale of the contemporary exercise makes that question larger.

The Special Intensive Revision, which began in Bihar in 2025, has since expanded across the country. The ECI's draft-roll exercise has resulted in more than 13 crore names being left out across 30 states and Union territories. In West Bengal alone, the Commission told the Supreme Court that 27.16 lakh voters had been removed during the SIR exercise, while more than 22 lakh subsequently filed appeals seeking reinstatement. The ECI has defended the deletions, citing categories including absent, shifted, dead and duplicate electors.

The numbers alone do not establish that the deletions are baseless.

But they establish the scale of the administrative power involved.

And the internal objections matter because they come not from political parties outside the Commission but from Election Commissioners themselves.

The Commission has rejected any suggestion that these differences invalidate its decisions. In its response to the investigation, it said the notes recorded by Sandhu and Joshi were part of institutional deliberation and maintained that decisions of the Commission had been unanimous. The Commission did not dispute the existence or contents of the 14 notes reported by the newspaper.

That response is important.

So is the dissent. Because the credibility of an election commission does not rest only on whether it can conduct polling day without visible disorder. It rests on whether citizens can trust the machinery that determines who appears on the roll before polling day arrives.

That was the problem Sukumar Sen confronted in 1951.

He was not merely preparing an election. He was establishing the idea that the republic would find its people before asking them to choose their government.

The poor were not too poor to vote.

The illiterate were not too illiterate to vote.

Women were not too socially constrained to possess an electoral identity.

The Prime Minister was not entitled to a greater vote than the labourer whose name Sen's officials were painstakingly recording in a remote village.

Everyone entered the electoral system through the same fundamental door.

That is why the story of Sukumar Sen is not simply a story about India's first election. It is the story of an institution being built as a guarantor of political equality in a society marked by almost every other form of inequality.

And that is also why the current questions surrounding the Election Commission are larger than a dispute between three commissioners.

When an electoral roll is altered, a name is not merely changed in a database. A citizen's access to the central instrument of representative democracy is affected.

When an eligible voter cannot have an Electoral Registration Officer's decision entered into the system, the problem is not merely software.

And when two members of a three-member constitutional body repeatedly record objections saying that decisions affecting the electoral machinery were taken without their knowledge, the issue is not merely an internal disagreement.

It becomes a question of institutional trust.

Sukumar Sen spent September 1951 building a system that had never existed before, because a new republic could not afford to tell millions of its citizens that democracy was too difficult to deliver to them.

Today, the question is almost the reverse.

After seventy-five years of learning how to count every citizen, can the Election Commission retain the credibility to assure every citizen that the count is being done fairly?

From this to that, the distance is not measured only in years.

It is measured in what the institution believes its first duty is.

For Sukumar Sen, it was to make the citizen visible to the republic.

The question now is whether the republic can remain equally visible to the citizen.