With each passing day, the Election Commission has more to explain about the conduct of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. On Monday, the Supreme Court questioned one of the Commission’s most consequential claims on the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR): that the modified Form 6 declaration had the court’s approval.

The clarification from Chief Justice Surya Kant matters because the Commission did not merely refer to the Supreme Court judgment as background. In its September 26 statement, the ECI had suggested that the new declaration attached to Form 6 was consistent with, and approved by, the Supreme Court’s May 2026 judgment on Bihar SIR. The court has now made it clear that it did not approve any modified Form 6.

Consider the chronology. 

The modified declaration was introduced after the Supreme Court’s May judgment. The new version requires a person applying for inclusion to state whether they or their parents were included or mapped in the previous SIR. However, five days ago this modification was taken back by ECI. This was not part of the earlier Form 6 used in the SIR exercise. The very legality of this change had already become a point of disagreement within the Commission, with Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objecting that the statutory Form 6 could not be changed without an amendment to the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.

And yet, despite those objections, the modified form was introduced.

When the internal disagreement was reported, the Commission’s September 26 statement offered a defence by referring to the Supreme Court’s Bihar SIR judgment. But Monday’s hearing has now complicated that explanation considerably. The CJI went a step further, saying that once the records are produced, the court would want to know who modified the form.

That is no longer merely a political argument over SIR. It is a question about institutional procedure.

The Supreme Court was hearing a petition that alleges several SIR-related decisions were taken unilaterally by the CEC despite objections from the other two Election Commissioners. The petition refers to the Indian Express investigation that mentioned at least 14 instances between October 2025 and August 2026 when the two Commissioners recorded objections. The court has issued notice to the ECI, Gyanesh Kumar and other officials, though it has not accepted the allegations as established facts. 

The court also declined, at this stage, to suspend Gyanesh Kumar or pass an ex parte interim order against him. That distinction is important. A notice is not a finding against the CEC. But it does mean that allegations about the Commission's functioning, including whether decisions were taken without the concurrence of its other Commissioner, will now require an answer before the court.

And this is where the Form 6 controversy becomes particularly significant.

The Election Commission is not an ordinary government department where a senior officer can simply overrule colleagues. It is a constitutional body whose credibility depends heavily on the perception that decisions are institutional decisions, rather than the decisions of one individual. The allegation now before the court is precisely about that distinction.

The Commission may ultimately be able to explain why the modified Form 6 was introduced, who authorised it and under what legal provision. But the sequence is difficult to ignore: objections were raised internally, the form was nevertheless implemented, the ECI subsequently invoked the Supreme Court’s judgment in defending it, and the CJI has now clarified that the court did not approve the modified form.

For an institution whose most important currency is public trust, the question is therefore no longer just whether the new Form 6 is legally valid. It is also who changed it, on what authority, and why the Supreme Court’s judgment was cited as approval when the court says it did not approve the modification.

The Election Commission will now have to answer those questions.

A quarter-century of Modi governance calls for questions and a hamper. To mark the occasion, we have offers for subscribers and other readers.