On December 31, 2025, Trinamool Congress national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee walked out of the Election Commission of India’s New Delhi office. Visibly agitated, he told reporters that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had spent the TMC’s meeting pointing fingers and dodging questions about the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
“I told him to stop pointing fingers at us. That we were elected representatives and he was just a nominated member,” Banerjee told reporters. But the session was far more volatile than the TMC leader let on.
There were heated exchanges.
The meeting lasted an hour and 10 minutes. At one point, a senior TMC leader said, “We don’t wish to get personal. We wish to stay on our core issue…That’s why in the high constitutional office, we are not raising questions that are being raised on social media by many about the rapid promotions of your closest family members, including your two daughters and sons-in-law.” Gyanesh asked the TMC delegation not to get personal.
It was not the first such encounter though. The party demanded that a transcript of their first meeting with the commission, held on November 28, be made public. That meeting, led by MP Derek O’Brien, had also turned tense.
The TMC had submitted five questions about the SIR process and a list of more than 40 people who had allegedly died by suicide or from stress linked to the massive exercise. Gyanesh, TMC leaders present said, spoke at length and largely uninterrupted in both meetings. One leader claimed he had a smirk on his face as the lists were handed over. “This is when a senior member of the delegation told him, ‘Mr CEC, wipe that smirk off your face. We are talking about people who died’.”
There was a third meeting on February 2, with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee leading the TMC delegation. It ended with her storming out of the CEC’s office, saying there were no answers on revisions or on the party’s allegations of bias.
The Trinamool was not alone in its grievances. Congress MP and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, in his press interactions alleging “vote chori”, or a systematic revision of electoral rolls aimed at benefiting the BJP, has also singled out Gyanesh several times. His party has gone a step further, preparing a dossier on the CEC, an indication of how far the relationship between sections of the opposition and the Election Commission has frayed.
The document claims that Gyanesh’s rise to the top of the Election Commission is “the outcome of a deliberate design to test and reward his loyalty to the Modi–Shah regime”, describing him as a “discreet executor” of their agenda and arguing that his record “does not suit the impartial stature demanded of a Chief Election Commissioner”.
What makes all this striking is Gyanesh’s history before he became CEC.
A Kerala cadre IAS officer, he served under both Congress and CPI(M) governments in the state. Many fellow bureaucrats and politicians describe him as someone who generally worked in lockstep with the government of the day. So much so that even when a Malaysian citizen died during his tenure as Kerala’s PWD Secretary, allegedly leaving behind a note accusing the department of corruption, the then CPI(M) government did not isolate him.
The question this profile tries to answer is how that man became this one.
Chapter 1: Article 370’s ‘crack team’
Gyanesh was part of the ‘crack team’ tasked with finding a legal and administrative pathway for the removal of Article 370 in Kashmir. This is what a book published by BlueKraft Digital Foundation – an organisation with close ties to the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi – says while detailing his role in the abrogation of Article 370. The book, which claims to have interviewed Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and several bureaucrats, offers a largely hagiographical account of the planning.
Modi had been eyeing the abrogation since 2017, reportedly discussing it with Arun Jaitley while keeping even Amit Shah out of the loop initially. After the 2019 Pulwama attack, the PM informed then Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba about the plan.