What the Supreme Court plea against Gyanesh Kumar seeks to uncover

A petition before the Supreme Court has moved the Election Commission’s internal dispute over SIR from the realm of reported dissent into a demand for criminal investigation, forensic scrutiny of electoral databases and judicial examination of how decisions affecting voter rolls were taken.

Filed under Article 32 by advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi, the petition seeks criminal proceedings against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg, ECI IT chief Seema Khanna and others under Section 32 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which deals with specified breaches of official duty in the preparation, revision or correction of electoral rolls. It also asks the court to declare decisions, directives and software modifications allegedly undertaken without the concurrence of the other two Election Commissioners unconstitutional and void.

The petition’s most expansive demand is an independent judicial inquiry or SIT, headed by a retired Supreme Court judge and assisted by cybersecurity and IT experts. It seeks a forensic audit of ECINet and ERONet, preservation of their server logs, databases, communications and metadata from October 1, 2025, and an investigation into what the petitioner describes as the deletion of around 13 crore names across 30 States and Union Territories during SIR. That number is an allegation contained in the petition, not a judicial finding.

But the case is built around a much more specific trail.

The Form 6 trail

Form 6 is the statutory application through which a person seeks inclusion in the electoral roll. The Election Commission’s prescribed form, under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, asks for the applicant’s name, details of a relative, date of birth, ordinary residence and supporting documents, followed by a declaration regarding eligibility.

The controversy concerns what appeared on the online version of that form.

The Indian Express reported that an additional declaration was inserted into Form 6 on ECINet asking for details linking the applicant or their parents to the electoral roll of the previous SIR. The statutory Form 6 itself had not been amended.

According to the reported file notings, Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi objected that the statutory form could not be altered without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. Sukhbir Singh Sandhu subsequently concurred and reportedly described the change as “unauthorised and illegal”. The petition alleges that the modified form nevertheless remained operational.

So the question is not simply what information Form 6 asks a new voter to provide. It is who had the legal authority to change the mechanism through which a citizen enters the electoral roll.

That question becomes larger because the petition invokes Section 18 of the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023. Where members of the Commission differ, the law provides for decision-making according to the majority opinion. The petition therefore argues that decisions allegedly taken without the concurrence of the other two commissioners cannot simply be treated as decisions of the Commission itself.

Bengal provides the test case

The petition points to West Bengal, where the dispute over electoral-roll inclusion has already produced a substantial appellate trail. It cites 16.10 lakh appeals allegedly filed in the ECI’s name against voters whose inclusion had been restored by judicial officers, and seeks an investigation into who authorised those appeals.

The scale of the Bengal process is visible in the ECI’s own figures. More than 38.20 lakh appeals relating to inclusion or deletion had been filed, of which about 1.02 lakh had been disposed of, leaving over 37 lakh pending as of September 18. The ECI had also told the Supreme Court that 34.13 lakh Form 6 applications were filed between December 17, 2025 and August 7, 2026.

This is where the Form 6 dispute stops looking like a technical disagreement over an online form. Form 6 is the entry point into the electoral roll; the electoral roll is the legal gateway to voting. The ECI itself states that a person can vote only if their name appears on the voter list.

The Supreme Court is therefore being asked to examine two connected questions: were the rules governing entry and deletion from electoral rolls changed through the authority prescribed by law, and can the digital machinery implementing those changes be independently audited?

The ECI has maintained that differences of opinion are part of institutional deliberation and that SIR-related decisions were ultimately approved unanimously by the full Commission. The petition now asks the court to look beyond that assurance — at the records, the statutory forms, the software trail and the question of who authorised what.

That is the larger significance of the plea: not merely how many names were deleted, but how the machinery deciding who remains on India’s electoral rolls was itself being controlled.