‘Just colleagues disagreeing’: How the Election Commission rift played out on TV news

When the Indian Express reported on the rift inside the Election Commission, some of the usual suspects on primetime news had a ready frame. According to them, the Election Commission’s own clarification highlighted that debate and dissent precede any decision, and that decisions were unanimous. 

Of the eight Hindi and English anchors reviewed here, four used that line to argue that the report described nothing unusual and that the criticism was politics. Only NDTV’s Padmaja Joshi and India TV’s Rajat Sharma pressed the Commission on what it had not explained. Both asked why access to the system used to prepare voter lists had been restricted.

Criticism as opposition routine

Rahul Shivshankar of News18 opened by casting the Commission as a daily target, “hauled over the coals” by critics of the Modi government. The “tropes are well established”, he said, and the allegations are “fired without deference to evidence”. 

He did not name the Indian Express, referring only to “a mainstream newspaper”. Dissent, he argued, was “a sign that the CEC is not an autocrat”, and “if it makes a fault, that, viewers, is accountability”.

Amish Devgan of News18 India began with the BJP’s position that disagreement is “a hallmark of a healthy democracy,” and spoke of how “disagreements occur in our own workplaces too.” 

Going further, he said, “You and I work somewhere too; disagreements can arise there. But this is democratic too.” Asking Congress’s Gurdeep Sappal why the disagreement was being made “such a massive issue”, he supplied the answer himself: “Because it suits your political agenda.”

Sushant Sinha of Times Now Navbharat said the Opposition, having lost “election after election”, had found “a new agenda to corner Narendra Modi”. The leaders of the “INDI Alliance”, who had earlier blamed their defeats on “everything from EVM hacking to vote theft”, were now “united in their attack” on the Election Commission and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Rahul Gandhi, Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav and Kejriwal, he said, had all “opened a united front against him”.

He then took on the “14 objections” of the Election Commissioners that the Indian Express had reported on, asking whether they affected the voter list. On the first, dated October 28, 2025, which highlighted the issue Election Commissioners took on letters and orders issued in the Commission's name without its approval, he said, “I don’t see any.” 

Sandhu’s complaint that he learnt of the new IT rules and portal from the media was, in Sinha’s words, possibly “an internal matter”. Of Joshi’s objection to officials travelling abroad without the Commission’s permission, he asked: “what is the point of printing this dissent?” The CEC, he added, normally approves such trips, so he must have approved this one.

Sinha also turned on The Indian Express’ report. Of each objection, he asked what had followed, and complained that the report did not say. On the first, he said the paper had not printed the Commission’s reply: “They don’t even know what the reply was.” He did acknowledge that the report itself records that neither the Commission nor the two commissioners responded when asked whether any action had followed their objections. 

He also suggested the paper had inflated the magnitude of the disagreements within the Commission. If, in an office of four, one person asks another a question, he said, the paper would “print every single thing as dissent so that it looks like it happened 14 times; otherwise it wouldn’t be any fun with four or five”. He said the gist of the 14 objections was that questions could be raised about the Commission’s “work environment”, and that “internal politics” was possible. But people can hold different opinions, he said. “Why have three election commissioners been made?” he asked. If everything was to follow one person’s view, with no disagreement, “then democracy itself will end”.

Three Hindi anchors on three channels reached for the same comparison: the office. Devgan spoke of colleagues who disagree, Sinha of “ten people” in an office, and Liyaquat of two journalists deciding whether to cover a story.

Criticism as a molehill

Liyaquat of Times Now Navbharat called the 14 objections “only half the picture”. In the past few months, she said, the Commission had taken 40 decisions, all by unanimity. 

She also pointed to the report’s silence: “Nowhere does it specify exactly which decision was taken by one individual that the other two disagreed with.” Her other argument was arithmetic. If two commissioners had opposed a decision, it “simply could not have been implemented”.

Navika Kumar of Times Now asked whether dissent “establishes vote chori” or whether the “political chargesheet” had run ahead of the evidence. She noted that the 13 crore names left out of the SIR draft rolls were “not necessarily final deletions”, and that the Supreme Court had upheld the Commission’s power to conduct the SIR. 

Her verdict was a question: “are we making a mountain out of a molehill out of a regular process of discussion, debate leading up to a consensus?” She also observed that the two commissioners had not yet broken their silence, and, in a later segment, asked a BJP spokesperson why no press conference had followed the report and why the Commission had not met for four months.

Questioning the Commission, Gyanesh

Padmaja Joshi of NDTV took on the Commission’s claim of unanimity: “How can one claim that decisions were made unanimously when clearly dissent has been expressed on record,” by at least two commissioners? She asked whether power over the software used to prepare voter lists had been centralised, why the electoral registration officer’s access to it was restricted, and whether the process of preparing the electoral rolls could be trusted.

Rajat Sharma’s broadcast on India TV was the most direct attack on Kumar. “It is no secret that Gyanesh Kumar treats the Election Commission as his personal fiefdom,” he said. The Commission’s replies, he said, had not clarified whom Kumar consulted before handing control of the Commission’s data to “his favoured officers”, why access to the voter-list system was restricted, or whom he consulted on changes to Form 6. 

To the claim of collective decisions, he replied: “If decisions had indeed been made jointly, why would the other Election Commissioners complain against him?” He also asked whether it was not “shameful” that the other two commissioners learnt of the Commission’s activities from the media. Yet Sharma’s broadcast also opened with the observation that opposition leaders had found “ready-made fodder” in the report.

Chitra Tripathi on ABP News granted that dissent has a history in the Commission, citing Ashok Lavasa’s 2019 dissent, and that decisions in those cases were made by majority. 

“Having a difference of opinion is one thing, but implementing decisions without consensus or a majority is an entirely different matter,” she said. However, the recent revelation, she remarked, is not merely about the impartiality and transparency of the Election Commission; “it also casts doubt on the process behind the deletion of 13 crore names under the SIR initiative.”

If primetime largely treated the objections as the ordinary friction of a workplace, the newspapers did not.

Newspaper editorials press EC over dissent, SIR

Four major English dailies, including The Indian Express, The Hindu, Hindustan Times and the Times of India criticised the Election Commission’s handling of the SIR process. 

The Indian Express

In its editorial headlined ‘Two ECs stand up to ask; CEC must answer, SC must not turn away’, the paper said its investigation lifted the lid on an institution's inner workings and showed a breach of trust with the people. It noted that although the NDA government handpicked all three members of the Commission, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected on record 14 times in 10 months, citing being kept in the dark, changes to Form 6 and the centralisation of the voter database. Their concerns went unaddressed, and they appealed to the Cabinet Secretary.

The editorial faulted CEC Gyanesh Kumar for making no attempt to respond to his colleagues, saying his silence “frames the crisis”. It said the concerns they raised echoed criticism of the Special Intensive Revision already voiced outside the ECI. The process, it said, shifted the burden of proof onto voters, demanded difficult paperwork within unrealistic time-frames and allowed appeals with no deadlines, becoming “an opaque and heartless citizenship test”.

The Hindu

Under the headline ‘Deep rot’, The Hindu took the hardest line, stating, “Mr Kumar must resign”. It also said the court must halt further deletions until the roll database is audited.

The paper cited West Bengal, where about 60 lakh electors were flagged for software-generated “logical discrepancies” and 27 lakh names were deleted. It said over nine in 10 appeals decided so far have restored electors and added that the Supreme Court had earlier upheld the SIR without adequately confronting a design that places the burden of proof on citizens. It also pointed to Justice Dipankar Datta’s opinion that the 2023 law replacing the CJI on the selection panel with a Union Minister fails the “perception test”. 

Hindustan Times

In ‘ECI needs to course correct’, the paper listed three problems: legal (the Form 6 change), technical (state poll officials’ functioning curtailed by the central IT team) and procedural (14 objections by two of three commissioners). It said the CEC is the first among equals, citing the 1995 TN Seshan judgment, and called the dissent an “alarming rupture”.

The editorial said the ECI cannot evade these questions by adopting an “adversarial posture or aggressive press conferences”. It also linked the ECI’s reputation to the structural questions around commissioner selection, which the Supreme Court has referred to a five-judge bench.

Times of India

Under the headline ‘Commission Omission?’, the paper was the most measured. It argued that when consensus is repeatedly elusive, a leader must ask why. It said the CEC “arguably” took several important decisions that the other two commissioners disagreed with, referring to the Express report. It listed problems with the SIR: Bengal tribunals could take 12 years to clear 37 lakh pending appeals, 97 names cleared for inclusion in Goa could not be added to the centralised system, and 16 lakh of Bengal's 38 lakh appeals were filed by “other entities” whose identities remain unclear. The editorial said the ECI’s approach to rolls “must start with a bias for inclusion”, and unlike The Hindu, it did not call for the CEC's resignation.

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