Ramesh demands Gyanesh Kumar's resignation and calls the chief election commissioner a liability

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh on Monday demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and called him a liability for the country over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. He tied the demand to remarks by Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan that any process leading to the disenfranchisement of millions would be intrinsically arbitrary and a negation of the constitutional order. Ramesh also said Kumar had executed what he called G2's illegal orders. The Election Commission said differing views are part of institutional deliberation and that its orders carry full legal sanction.

The demand landed on the morning the Supreme Court was due to hear petitions seeking Kumar's suspension and prosecution over revision decisions alleged to have been taken unilaterally, and seeking an SIT or judicial probe into voter deletions. The bench is Chief Justice Surya Kant with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana. A separate line of reporting on Sunday and Monday said the court had refused to suspend Kumar and had issued notice on the revision pleas. Monday's political demand is a resignation call. It is not a court order.

What Bhuyan said, and what he did not order

Bhuyan's warning, as Ramesh cited it, is about a class of process: one that removes the vote from millions. He described that class as arbitrary and unconstitutional. He did not, in the remarks Ramesh quoted, name a state roll, a deletion count, or an order striking the revision down. Ramesh used the remark as the reason a resignation should follow. The Commission answered on process. It said disagreement inside the institution is how deliberation works, and that the orders already issued have legal sanction. Those are two different claims. One is about the legitimacy of a mass deletion. The other is about the legality of the paper the Commission has signed.

The revision itself is the Special Intensive Revision, the roll exercise that has produced state-level challenges and a petition aimed at the chief election commissioner personally. Uttarakhand's final roll, published separately, dropped 801,813 names from the 7,960,762 on the books when that state's revision began. That figure is one state's published arithmetic. It is not a national total, and Bhuyan did not attach his remark to it. It is the sort of number the resignation demand is pointing at when it says millions.

The same morning in court

The court's Monday list also included the West Bengal government's challenge to interim bail for Milan Pradhan, the Congress candidate in the Nandigram assembly by-election, and the bail plea of Ashish Mishra in the Lakhimpur Kheri case. Those matters share a bench with the revision pleas. They do not share a record. A resignation demand issued while the revision pleas are being heard asks the commissioner to leave before the bench has ruled on suspension. The Commission's reply, that its orders have legal sanction, is the position the bench will test if it reaches the merits.

Ramesh's phrase, a liability for the country, is political language. The dated facts under it are narrower: a resignation demand on 5 October, a justice's warning about mass disenfranchisement, a Commission statement that internal disagreement is deliberation, and a bench already seized of pleas to suspend the same officer. The court has not ordered the resignation. Congress has asked for it.