Why is the BJP backing Gyanesh Kumar | Let Me Explain 166 | Pooja Prasanna

Name: Why is the BJP backing Gyanesh Kumar | Let Me Explain 166 | Pooja Prasanna
Uploaded: 2026-10-01T16:05:00Z
Description: Why is the BJP so invested in defending Gyanesh Kumar? From his role in the Modi government’s biggest political projects to his appointment as Chief Election Commissioner, questions about his career, family, and the Election Commission’s credibility continue to grow.

Why is the BJP so invested in defending Gyanesh Kumar? From his role in the Modi government’s biggest political projects to his appointment as Chief Election Commissioner, questions about his career, family, and the Election Commission’s credibility continue to grow.

Written by:

As demands for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation grew, it wasn’t Gyanesh Kumar who came out to defend himself.

It was the BJP that came out in full strength declaring- hum gyanesh ke saath hai.

In fact, a dozen BJP Chief Ministers issued statements or held press meets applauding Gyanesh Kumar

BJP spokespersons were on cue on TV channels

And a few Hindutva groups protested, asking the Bharat Ratna for Kumarji

So why is the BJP so invested in defending Gyanesh Kumar?

Is it simply because of his record as Chief Election Commissioner?

Or could his long career in the Union government offer us a clue?

Especially his role in some of the Modi government’s most consequential projects.

LET ME EXPLAIN

Before we get into it, a quick ask.

Let Me Explain exists because we believe some stories need more than a headline and a 30-second clip.

If you want us to keep doing this kind of journalism, become a paid subscriber of The News Minute, or contribute to the Let Me Explain fund. Don’t skip this part- this is essential to our existence and growth.

You fund the journalism. We will do the digging.

Support our legal fund: https://www.thenewsminute.com/subscription?utm_source=legal&utm_medium=lme&utm_campaign=legal

Like Pooja's LME? Support the show:

https://rzp.io/rzp/support-lme

Like our journalism? Become a subscriber:

https://www.thenewsminute.com/subscription

Follow our WhatsApp channel:

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbDIedz2phHLQZTyNj1W

Now, let’s get into the story

In a profile for Newslaundry and The News Minute, journalists Sumedha Mittal and Jisha Surya traced Gyanesh Kumar’s journey and called him India’s most divisive Chief Election Commissioner.

Gyanesh Kumar’s career is unusual.

He spent 18 years in the Kerala cadre before moving to Delhi. There, he took up key positions in the Home Ministry. He was involved in some of the Modi government’s biggest political and administrative projects, including the implementation of govt’s plans in Jammu and Kashmir and the Ayodhya Ram temple.

Let me tell you what these two journalists found.

In August 2025, after Rahul Gandhi and Gyanesh Kumar had a showdown over vote chori allegations, a team of people from Rahul Gandhi’s office went to Kerala.

The mission was to find out about the suicide of a Malaysian man named Lee See Been in 2007 and add it to a dossier that the party was making on Gyanesh Kumar.

Like I said earlier, Gyanesh Kumar started his career as a bureaucrat in the Kerala cadre. He held several key posts, including district collector and Kerala PWD secretary.

Most politicians - from the Congress and the left that we spoke to said he was an officer who worked in tandem with the governments.

But one episode from his time in the PWD has come up recently.

In the mid-2000s, a road project involving a Malaysian company and an Indian firm ran into trouble and payments to the Malaysian company were withheld by the then Left government.

In 2006, the Malaysian company's project manager, Lee See Been, was found dead near Kuala Lumpur. He had died by suicide.

A vigilance probe was ordered into the project, including the role of PWD officials.

So what happened to that probe?

We filed an RTI with the Kerala Vigilance Department.

Its response was that the matter had been closed after no irregularities were found.

Recently, former Kerala PWD minister TM Thomas Isaac accused Gyanesh Kumar of being “corrupt and authoritarian” and called for an investigation into his career, including his time as PWD secretary.

Those are, of course, political allegations.

But by 2007, Gyanesh had moved out of Kerala and to Delhi.

And that's when his career took a very different turn.

Gyanesh Kumar first worked as a joint secretary in the Ministry of Defence.

And later in 2016, he joined the Home Ministry as a Joint Secretary.

Within a few years, he became part of what a book published by BlueKraft Digital Foundation describes as the Home Ministry's “crack team”.

BlueKraft Digital Foundation is an organisation that works closely with the BJP and PM Modi.

Now, according to this book, Article 370 abrogation was one of PM Modi’s major plans from 2017. After the 2019 Pulwama attack, the PM asked Home Secretary Rajiv Gauba to get on it.

Gauba then asked two other officers, including Gyanesh, to execute the tasks.

The first was to remove Article 35A through a constitutional order.

The book has a glorifying account of how Gyanesh kept the entire plan secret. He apparently even handled files that would normally be done by junior officers and prepared 12 drafts of the same bill.

On August 5, 2019, Gyanesh had a final task. He had to get the President’s signature on Constitutional Order 272. This would transfer the power to abrogate Article 370 from J&K’s Constituent Assembly to Parliament.

The bill was rushed into the Rajya Sabha at 11:07 am, with members receiving the updated agenda after it had already been introduced.

In fact, many parliamentarians protested that no one got notice, and no one knew what was happening. And the bill was passed.

This was one of the Modi government's biggest political projects.

And Gyanesh Kumar was one of the bureaucrats involved in making it happen.

But that wasn't the only politically significant assignment he handed.

In November 2019, the Supreme Court ordered the government to establish a trust to oversee the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

In January 2020, the Home Ministry reorganised its internal security divisions and brought the Ayodhya desk under Gyanesh Kumar.

He was also handling Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh affairs.

This desk, set up the Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra, began fundraising for the temple. The trust raised over Rs 3,500 crore from across the country.

The funding and functioning of this trust were, as usual, secretive. No RTI replies, no public information officer, nothing.

And today we know of the scam in the Ayodhya Ram temples. The opaque functioning has led to today’s crisis.

Gyanesh Kumar retired in January 2024.

But retirement didn't mean the end of his association with the union government.

Just two months later, he was back at the centre of national politics.

In March 2024, just before the Lok Sabha election schedule was announced, the Election Commission was facing a vacancy crisis.

There was only one Election Commissioner left. The other two positions were vacant.

The government sent Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, who was part of the selection committee, a list of 212 officers.

Chowdhury publicly questioned how he could assess 212 officers overnight.

Then, just minutes before the meeting, the government gave the committee a shortlist of six names.

Two officers were selected:

Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu.

A year later, Gyanesh Kumar became Chief Election Commissioner.

But that appointment itself was controversial

He became the first CEC to be appointed after the Chief Justice of India was removed from the selection committee and replaced with a cabinet minister.

In a midnight meeting, two members of the committee, PM Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, selected Gyanesh Kumar. The third member, Rahul Gandhi, objected and asked what was the tearing hurry for a midnight appointment?

One of his first major announcements as the new CEC was a nationwide SIR of the voter rolls.

One of the most controversial exercises undertaken in independent India that’s left millions scrambling for documents and many left out of the voter rolls.

There is another part of his story that has also attracted scrutiny.

His family.

The Congress dossier on Gyanesh Kumar claimed that members of his family had frequently been posted in politically sensitive states.

The dossier suggested that this was deliberate.

Though there is no evidence establishing that allegation, there have been several developments involving members of his family that have generated questions.

In November 2025, Gyanesh’s daughter Medha Roopam IAS filed FIRs against 60 booth-level officers and seven supervisors. She alleged negligence and disobedience during SIR. She was the first officer to do so.

There was also an unusual development in the Supreme Court last week.

Allahabad High Court had ordered Medha Roopam to pay Rs 5 lakh from her salary to a student whom she had detained under the National Security Act.

The order was subsequently stayed by the Supreme Court.

The case came before a bench headed by Justice Satish Chandra Sharma.

Questions were raised about the case being listed before that bench, since Justice Sharma did not have the regular roster for the matter.

Livelaw also reported concerns about a potential conflict because Justice Sharma's son is a standing counsel for the Election Commission.

Then there is his son-in-law, IAS officer Manish Bansal.

Bansal was the returning officer and district magistrate in Sambhal during the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The Election Commission rejected allegations of voter suppression in the constituency based on a report submitted by Bansal.

As Scroll reported, Bansal had described video footage showing Muslim voters being prevented from voting at some polling stations as “false and misleading”.

Again, the significance here is the question of potential conflict of interest

And now we are back to where we started.

Opposition parties and protesters are demanding Gyanesh Kumar's resignation.

And today, as the Election Commission faces one of its biggest credibility challenges in years, he is the face of the institution.

Dharmendra Pradhan was important to Modi and Shah, but they had to let him go. But what about Gyanesh Kumar? Will the man from Amit Shah’s crack team be allowed to resign?

But there is a larger issue here.

The problem cannot be reduced to whether Gyanesh Kumar resigns or stays.

The Election Commission is bigger than one CEC.

What we also need is for the Election Commission, as an institution, to redeem its credibility.