CEC Gyanesh Kumar must resign, turn approver: Rahul Gandhi

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi called for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar a day after The Indian Express reported that two Election Commissioners had dissented to decisions related to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls several times over the past year. The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha also said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would be “investigated for their conspiracy to steal elections.” 

Addressing the media in the wake of the report, Rahul Gandhi said that the reason there was no response to the notes of dissent by the two Election Commissioners – Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi – was because “there were protectors of Gyanesh Kumar sitting on top of him, namely PM Modi, Amit Shah, and others.”

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that the two Election Commissioners had formally objected to decisions related to SIR at least 14 times in the past 10 months, including changes in Form 6 for the registration of new voters and centralised access to the electoral roll database. It even said that the two ECs wrote to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan flagging these issues. 

Rahul Gandhi said that he had enough information to prove with certainty that the ECI’s actions under Gyanesh Kumar had seriously damaged the voting system in India. He said that the people responsible for this would be punished, adding, “The two Election Commissioners have done a wise thing. They have come clean. Gyanesh Kumar should think seriously about the position he is in and turn approver. That is my advice to him. That would be an act of nationalism,” Rahul Gandhi said. 

He started his media address on September 24 by playing videos of PM Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah claiming that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would remain in power for the next 30 to 50 years, and that they would win over 400 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. 

“No political leader who operates in a democratic environment can make such a statement,” Rahul Gandhi said. He questioned how the BJP often appeared immune to anti-incumbency and said, “There is no democracy on this planet where anti-incumbency does not exist.”

He said that the answer to this question lay in the attack on the vote in India. 

“If the vote has been destroyed, then our Constitution has been destroyed, it no longer has its power, it no longer functions. If our Constitution has been destroyed, our laws are illegal. If our laws are illegal, our institutions are meaningless,” he said, adding, “This is not just an attack on the vote. This is an attack on the idea, on the basic infrastructure, on the expression of every single Indian person.”