Supreme Court bench takes up pleas to suspend CEC Gyanesh Kumar

A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant is scheduled on Monday to hear pleas that ask for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to be suspended, and for decisions he is said to have taken without his two colleagues to be unwound. Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana sit with the chief justice. The petitioners are Patna resident Rakesh Kumar Singh and advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi.

Singh's petition asks the court to decide whether Kumar used powers that belong to the Election Commission as a body. If the court finds that he did, the plea wants those acts declared unauthorised. The interim ask is sharper. It says Kumar should not exercise the functions of chief election commissioner until the case is finally heard, and that in that period the commission's business should be done by the unanimous decision of election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. Any appointment to a vacancy, the plea says, should come on the recommendation of a committee that includes the chief justice.

That last line reaches past this case into the appointment fight the court has already had. The plea treats a suspension as something that might create a vacancy, and it tries to write the filling of that vacancy in advance. The court does not have to accept the framing. It does have to notice that the petitioner is asking a three-judge bench to rearrange a constitutional body on an interim order.

The backdrop is a report in the Indian Express that Sandhu and Joshi objected on record at least 14 times in the past 10 months to decisions and orders on the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The report said the two commissioners described orders as issued without their knowledge or recommendation. The petitions also challenge guidelines and software changes said to have been made without their concurrence. A chief election commissioner who signs what his colleagues say they did not see is the factual core. The legal core is whether the commission is a body of three or an office of one.

The Representation of the People Act and the Constitution treat the Election Commission as a commission. Transaction of business rules set out how the three members decide. A practice in which the chief signs and the others object later is a practice those rules were written to prevent. Fourteen recorded objections, if the Express account holds, are a paper trail a court can read. They are not yet a finding. Monday's hearing is a listing, not a judgment.

The special intensive revision is the policy the objections attach to. SIR is the exercise of checking and, in the government's telling, cleaning the rolls. Opposition parties have called it a selective deletion. Congress leader Sachin Pilot said on Sunday that Kumar had undermined the commission's independence and that SIR was being used to remove voters. The INDIA bloc has called a protest outside the commission's Delhi office for 7 October. In Mumbai, Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray led a march against the chief election commissioner. The court case and the street protests are running on the same allegation and on different clocks.

Kerala's government has separately ordered a probe linked to Kumar and a suicide case two decades old. That probe is not before Surya Kant's bench. It sits in the political file. A chief election commissioner who is answering a roll dispute, a suspension plea and a state police inquiry in the same week is a commissioner whose name is now the argument.

What Monday can produce is limited. The bench can issue notice, ask the commission for the transaction files, or refuse interim suspension. It is unlikely to decide, in one sitting, whether 14 objections void a year of roll orders. The order that would change the week is the one Singh asked for: Kumar stopped from acting, Sandhu and Joshi left to decide together. Anything short of that leaves the commission as it is while the paper is read.