The Form That Was Not Approved

The Election Commission of India told the country on Saturday 26 September that the Supreme Court had upheld the new declaration attached to its voter registration form. On Monday 5 October, the Chief Justice of India said the court had approved no modified form, and that it wanted to see who had made the change. Between those two statements lies a question that goes to the heart of Indian democracy: who controls the paperwork of the franchise.

The form is Form 6, the application by which a new voter’s name is entered on the electoral roll. It is prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which the central government makes under the Representation of the People Act, 1950. In July 2026, the online version of Form 6 on the Commission’s ECINET portal acquired a new declaration for use during the Special Intensive Revision of the rolls. Applicants were asked to say whether their own name had appeared in the roll at the last such revision, in the early 2000s, whether a parent’s or grandparent’s had, or whether neither had, and to give constituency, part and serial numbers for the entry, The Indian Express explained. The section was not marked mandatory, but an applicant could not submit the form without completing it, LiveLaw reported. In its Press Note No. 120 of 26 September, the Commission said: “The declaration attached to Form 6 for SIR has been upheld by the Hon’ble Supreme Court. For non-SIR period, the Forms applicable as per Rules (the Registration of Electors Rules 1960) will be used.”

It had not been. The judgment the Commission relied on, delivered on 27 May 2026 in the challenge to the Bihar revision, upheld the Commission’s power to conduct the exercise and allowed it a “residual authority” to tailor the documentation, while warning that the authority was “not unbounded”. It came before the July insertion and had no occasion to examine the new declaration, LiveLaw reported in its account of Monday’s proceedings. Chief Justice Surya Kant, sitting with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, was hearing petitions seeking action against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Responding to Senior Advocate Menaka Guruswamy, he said, as The Indian Express reported it: “Let’s be very clear. Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us… Let us also be clear that when the report will be produced, we will like to see who has modified what.”

The dissent inside the Commission

The controversy did not begin in the courtroom. It began inside the Election Commission itself. On 23 September The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected on record, at least 14 times in 10 months, to decisions taken in the Commission’s name, and that Sandhu had written on 13 August that the Form 6 change was “unauthorised and illegal” and must be removed. Their objection was that the form could not be altered unless the central government amended the Rules. It was after that reporting that the Commission issued its 26 September note invoking the Supreme Court’s authority, LiveLaw noted. The same note said the declaration would not be used outside SIR periods, and the Commission removed it from the portal in states where the revision had concluded, while leaving it in place where the revision continued, according to The Indian Express.

The bench issued notice on the petitions to the Centre, the Commission and its three commissioners, The Times of India reported. It declined to pass an interim order suspending Kumar, but said that the commissioners were expected to decide unanimously, or failing that by majority. “If records show some decision was not unanimous, etc., we will injunct those decisions and say they are ultra vires,” the bench said, according to the same report. An observation in open court is not a decree. But it removes the defense the Commission chose to make in public, and it sets the question the Commission’s reply will have to answer.

The political dimension is already inflamed. Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, wrote on X that it was “now established beyond doubt that Gyanesh Kumar changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally”, The Hindu reported. The Commission called his post misleading, saying the Bihar order had been issued with the Commission’s unanimous approval and upheld by the court, and pointing back to its press note. The BJP’s Sambit Patra said the post was “full of lies”: “The CJI did not say that the Form 6 was illegal,” he said, The Indian Express reported. The Biju Janata Dal, which had kept its distance from the opposition INDIA bloc, said Kumar had no moral right to continue and sent MPs to the opposition’s protest march in Delhi on Tuesday 6 October, The Indian Express reported; its parliamentary leader, Manas Mangaraj, alleged that more than 13 crore voters had been excluded across the country in the name of the revision, more than 20 lakh of them in Odisha, The New Indian Express reported. The BJP is right that the court has not declared the form illegal. Its critics are right that the court has disowned the approval the Commission claimed. Both can be true at once, which is precisely the problem.

Why the form matters

It is tempting to treat this as a procedural squabble, a dispute about paperwork. That would be a mistake. The electoral roll is the electorate. In a country of India’s size, the question of who is on the roll and who is off it is the question of who governs, decided long before any ballot is cast. A declaration that asks applicants to trace their enrolment, or their parents’, back to a roll more than two decades old does not merely verify identity. It creates a documentary burden that falls hardest on the poor, the migrant, the illiterate and the young, the citizens least able to find a parent’s part and serial number and most likely to be excluded by its absence.

The Special Intensive Revision is a legitimate exercise. Electoral rolls decay. People move, people die, duplicates accumulate, and a democracy needs clean lists. The Commission’s power to conduct the revision is not in serious dispute; the Supreme Court upheld it in May. What is in dispute is whether the Commission can add substantive new requirements through an online portal, over the recorded objections of two of its three members, without the amendment to the Rules that only the central government can make, and then claim the imprimatur of a court that never gave it.

This is the quiet way democracies erode. Not through canceled elections or seized ballot boxes, but through the slow accretion of administrative burdens, each one defensible in isolation, each one falling on the same people. The form is never just a form. It is a filter, and filters have politics.

The demand for a name

The most striking moment in the 5 October hearing was the Chief Justice’s interest in authorship. Not a ruling, not a stay, but a question: who modified what. It is a small demand with large implications. Bureaucracies diffuse responsibility by design. Decisions emerge from files and notings, from committees and concurrences, until no single person can be said to have decided anything. The court’s insistence on identifying the hand behind the change is an insistence that democratic accountability requires authors, not just processes.

The Commission must now answer. When the record is produced, the chain of authorization behind the July change can be reconstructed. Perhaps it will show a lawful exercise of the residual authority the court recognized in May. Perhaps it will show a change made without the Commission’s collective approval, kept in place after a commissioner called it illegal, and then defended by borrowing the court’s name. Either way, the country will know more than it does now, which is the point of the exercise.

India’s democracy is not fragile. But its strength has always depended on the integrity of its institutions, and the Election Commission’s integrity depends on the belief that it is nobody’s instrument. A form modified without a notified rule, defended with a claim the court disowns, does not sustain that belief. The Chief Justice has asked who made the change. The country is waiting for the answer.

Sources

The Chief Justice’s remarks, the composition of the bench, the petition by Shailendra Mani Tripathi and the point that the May judgment preceded the July declaration are from LiveLaw’s report of 5 October; the wording of the remarks quoted here is The Indian Express’s version, and other outlets reported slightly different wording. The text of the 26 September press note is as The Indian Express, LiveLaw and The Hindu quoted it, and its number is as the Commission gave it in a post on X quoted by The Indian Express; the note itself was not read on the Commission’s website. The contents of the declaration, the July date, Sandhu’s 13 August note and the removal of the declaration where the revision had ended are from The Indian Express’s explainer; the 27 May judgment’s language on residual authority is as LiveLaw quoted it, and the judgment was not read directly. The notice, the refusal to suspend and the bench’s remark on unanimity are from The Times of India and The Wire. Rahul Gandhi’s post is as The Hindu reported it; Sambit Patra’s remarks and the Commission’s response are as The Indian Express reported them; the BJD’s position and figures are as The Indian Express and The New Indian Express reported them, and the 13 crore and 20 lakh figures are the party’s allegations, not official totals. The Indian Express’s 23 September investigation was not read directly; its findings are as described in the outlet’s later reports and by LiveLaw.