How India's election chief became embroiled in a crisis of trust

**How India’s election chief was drawn into a trust crisis**

Gyanesh Kumar joined the Indian civil services in 1988

For much of his 36-year career in India’s bureaucracy, Gyanesh Kumar earned a reputation for getting difficult jobs done.

Now the 62-year-old, who oversees elections in the world’s most populous country, is facing a very different test: defending the way his own institution reaches decisions.

That is an unusual place for a bureaucrat who spent decades out of the public eye, even while handling some of the Indian government’s most politically sensitive assignments.

For around a year, Kumar, India’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), has been under heavy political pressure over a major overhaul of the country’s electoral rolls called the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR.

The exercise, which started in Bihar last year, has since been expanded to most of India, and more than 130 million names have been removed from draft voter lists across 30 states and federally-administered territories - about 13% of India’s electorate.

The Election Commission says the exercise is meant to remove duplicate and ineligible entries while making sure legitimate voters are included. Opposition parties and activists have said it could disenfranchise eligible voters. Kumar and the commission have denied claims that the process is being manipulated for political purposes.

Then this week, the dispute moved inside Kumar’s own institution.

The allegations are especially sensitive for the three-member Election Commission, where disagreements are settled by majority vote.

Kumar has not personally commented on the investigation.

In a statement released after the investigation, the commission did not deny the reported disagreements, but rejected claims of a serious internal split, saying differences of opinion were part of normal deliberations and that its decisions over the past year - including on SIR - were ultimately unanimous.

Over the weekend, Kumar, Sandhu and Joshi met and also issued a joint statement addressing some of the issues raised by the investigation.

But the commission’s response has not ended the controversy.

- are preparing a motion in both houses of parliament seeking Kumar’s removal. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-led pressure group whose protests forced a minister out in July, has threatened nationwide protests.

Others have defended the commission. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, whose party is part of the governing federal coalition, said the ECI’s clarification reaffirmed the institution’s “integrity” and criticised efforts to weaken confidence in India’s democratic processes.

For most of his career, Kumar worked far from the headlines.

Former colleagues have described him in past interviews as meticulous and deeply focused on detail, someone who rarely lost his temper and knew how to deliver under pressure. And when the Indian government needed officials to carry out some of its most consequential decisions, Kumar was repeatedly among them.

Born in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, Kumar studied civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur before joining the Indian Administrative Service in 1988.

He was posted to the southern state of Kerala, where his early career included a stint as district collector of Ernakulam, which includes the port city of Kochi, formerly known as Cochin. One of his most visible projects was the redevelopment of Kochi’s waterfront.

Years later, his assignments became far more sensitive.

In 2016, Kumar joined the Indian-administered Kashmir division of the federal home ministry. Three years later, he helped draft the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, part of the process through which Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked the region’s special constitutional status and split the former state into two federally-administered territories.

In 2019, India’s Supreme Court cleared the way for a temple to the Hindu god Ram to be built on a site in Ayodhya that had been disputed by Hindus and Muslims for decades.

Kumar, who was then an additional secretary in the Home Ministry, led the team responsible for carrying out the court’s ruling, including establishing the trust that would oversee the temple’s construction.

The assignments were very different, but both required a specific bureaucratic skill: making decisions with enormous political consequences and figuring out how the machinery of government would implement them.

People who worked with Kumar during those years say he was especially good at exactly that.

“He never left things for others, got personally involved,” one former colleague told

“I have never seen him lose his cool.” Another praised his “hard work and intelligence” and “administrative wisdom”.

Kumar retired from the civil service in January 2024. Less than two months later, he was appointed an election commissioner - a day before the schedule for India’s general election was announced. In February 2025, he became Chief Election Commissioner.

He was the first CEC appointed under a 2023 law that removed the Chief Justice of India from the selection panel and replaced the judge with a cabinet minister nominated by the prime minister. Opposition parties have argued that the change weakens the commission’s independence.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, the third member of the panel, opposed Kumar’s appointment and asked for it to be postponed while the Supreme Court examined challenges to the new law.

The law is still in force, but its validity remains before the Supreme Court. In September, a two-judge bench split over the challenge and referred the matter to the Chief Justice to consider sending it to a larger bench.

Kumar quickly brought his hands-on administrative style to the role. One of his first instructions was to require staff at the commission’s headquarters to record attendance strictly through biometrics, reportedly improving punctuality.

More than 130 million people have been removed from India’s electoral roll list

He also announced a series of reforms during his first 100 days, including plans to cut the number of voters assigned to polling stations, redesign voter information slips and improve access to polling stations in densely populated cities, according to media reports

In his first month, he oversaw the transfer of at least 10 chief electoral officers across states and federal territories - a number critics said was unusually high for routine changes. He described

, external his push to modernise and streamline the poll machinery as “EC 2.0”.

But it is the SIR that has come to define his tenure.

As criticism of the exercise intensified, Kumar became an increasingly public defender of it, at one point challenging Rahul Gandhi to back up his allegations of “vote theft” in a sworn affidavit or apologise.

The Express investigation suggested that concerns were also being raised inside the commission. It alleged that Sandhu described one change as “unauthorised and illegal”, while both commissioners raised concerns about the centralisation of the electoral-roll database and changes to its oversight.

The commission has rejected suggestions of a serious internal split. After the three commissioners met on Saturday, it said decisions taken by the full commission over the past year had been unanimous. It also announced changes to how it would function: meeting agendas would be circulated in advance, minutes would be issued and directions from commissioners to officials would be followed.

Whether the controversy will have lasting consequences for Kumar or the Election Commission is still unclear. But it has brought fresh scrutiny to both the SIR and one of India’s most important constitutional institutions.