Supreme Court says it never approved a modified voter Form 6

Chief Justice Surya Kant said on Monday that the Supreme Court had not approved any modified Form 6, the form used to enrol a new voter. The line came during a hearing on petitions that ask for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to be suspended over the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

“Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us. Let’s be clear. When the record is produced, we would like to see who has modified,” Kant said, according to accounts in The Statesman, Scroll and Business Standard. The bench, with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, did not grant an interim order. It issued notices to the Union government, the Election Commission, Kumar, election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, deputy election commissioner Maneesh Garg, and the commission’s director general for information technology, Seema Khanna.

Kant said the court would look at the record and step in if the statutory framework had been breached. He also said the court could not pass an order on newspaper reports alone.

What the commission had claimed

The clarification answers a specific claim. On 26 September the Election Commission said a declaration attached to Form 6 for the revision had been upheld by the Supreme Court. It pointed to the court’s May 2026 judgment on the Bihar revision. It also said the older Form 6 would be used in periods when a special intensive revision was not underway.

Monday’s bench separated that claim from what the court says it actually did. A judgment on the Bihar exercise is not, in the chief justice’s words from the hearing, approval of a modified form. The court wants the file that shows who changed the form, and when.

The row opened after a report in The Indian Express that Sandhu and Joshi had recorded dissent and called changes to Form 6 illegal, and that they had not been told of the changes. The two petitions before the court allege that 14 decisions on the revision were taken in the commission’s name despite objections those two commissioners recorded between October 2025 and August 2026.

Form 6 is the entry point for a new name

Form 6 is the application for inclusion in the electoral roll. A special intensive revision is a house-to-house check of the roll, not an ordinary annual update. In the current round, a declaration has been attached to the online form. Opposition parties have treated the declaration, and the question of who authorised it, as a question of whether the chief election commissioner acted alone.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said after the hearing that it was established that Kumar had changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally, and that those involved would be held accountable. The court has not made that finding. It has said it did not approve a modified form, and it has asked for replies. The difference is the whole of the interim position: a verbal clarification from the bench, notices to the officers named, and no suspension.

The commission’s September line, that the court had upheld the declaration, is now in direct conflict with the chief justice’s statement in open court. Until a written order sets the point down, the operative public words are Kant’s. Counsel for the commission will have to explain, in the replies the bench has sought, how a May judgment on Bihar became a claim of approval for a later form.

What the bench refused to do

The petitioners wanted Kumar suspended and prosecuted. The bench refused an interim order of that kind. Kant’s reason, as reported, was procedural as much as substantive. The court will not act on press reports as if they were the record. It will call for the record, see who modified the form, and test that against the statute.

That leaves the revision itself running. Notices do not freeze a form. Voters filling Form 6 this week are still using whatever version the commission has put online. The legal question the bench has opened is authorship: whether a change to the enrolment form was made inside the commission’s lawful process, and whether two commissioners’ recorded objections were bypassed.

The next useful document is not another speech. It is the reply the Election Commission files, and the order the bench writes once that reply is in. Until then, the court’s public position is the sentence Kant used on Monday. Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by the Supreme Court.