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Eleven opposition leaders filed a petition in India’s Supreme Court on Monday evening against the Election Commission and its three members Image Source: @INCIndia on X The petition was lodged after the leaders marched to the court from central Delhi. It was recorded on the Supreme Court website on Monday evening. The petitioners are the leaders of the opposition in both houses of parliament, Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge; Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party; Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal; Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar); Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena (UBT); Saugata Roy of the Trinamool Congress; D Raja of the Communist Party of India; M A Baby, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist); Mahua Majhi of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha; and E T Mohammed Basheer of the Indian Union Muslim League. Rahul Gandhi and Kharge had written asking to meet Chief Justice Surya Kant on Monday afternoon to hand him a memorandum. He d...

The Leaders of India's INDIA bloc held a silent protest at Rajghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, on Thursday, a day after police detained them short of the capital's designated protest site.  Image Source: @INCIndia on X They said they prayed for wisdom for the government and for the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar.  They alleged that the prime minister, the union home minister and CEC had hijacked the country through what they described as a criminal conspiracy involving the theft of votes.  Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, LoP Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with other INDIA bloc leaders, staged the protest at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial. The protest was peaceful today and police did not intervene, in contrast to the previous two days, when opposition MPs were stopped and detained on their way first to the Election Commission's headquarters and then to Jantar Mantar. चलिए शुरू करते हैं! https://t.co/kX3own1AUp — Supriya Shrinate (@...

Delhi Police detained the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, and other opposition MPs on Wednesday evening after stopping them about a hundred metres short of Jantar Mantar, the site designated for protests in the Indian capital Image Source: INCIndia on X The MPs had set out for Jantar Mantar a day after being prevented from marching to the headquarters of the Election Commission. They are demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. I am thankful to every INDIA alliance MP standing firm in defence of our democracy - in Parliament, outside on the streets, and today near Jantar Mantar. They can stop a march. They can refuse a meeting. But they cannot stop the will of our people. Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Gyanesh Kumar and the entire system will be brought to justice. — Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 7, 2026 Police had earlier detained INDIA bloc leaders and workers at ...

India's Supreme Court on Monday asked the Election Commission, the central government, the Chief Election Commissioner and the two other Election Commissioners to respond within a week to petitions arguing that decisions belonging to the Commission as a body have been taken by its chairman alone. Image Source: @tarunjatav50 on X A bench of the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, issued notice on two petitions and tagged them together. It declined to grant any interim relief. The petitions turn on a distinction that is ordinarily academic. Article 324 of the Constitution vests the superintendence and control of elections in the Election Commission, a body that currently has three members. The Chief Election Commissioner chairs it but, the petitioners argue, holds no separate authority of his own. Under the law governing the Commission, business is to be transacted unanimously so far as possible, and where the members differ, by majority. ...

A third day of marches in Delhi ended with buses, barricades and a student leader driven fifty kilometres out of the city before being let go. What the protesters want is the Chief Election Commissioner's resignation, which the Indian Constitution leaves almost nobody in a position to grant. File Photo: @SpokespersonECI on X Neha Bora was picked up for the third consecutive day on Sunday. She heads the All India Students' Association, a left-wing student body founded in 1990 and affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, which has long been among the strongest organisations on campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University. She was taken from near Jantar Mantar at about five in the evening and driven to a police station in Narela, roughly fifty kilometres away in the far north of Delhi. She was released that same evening and posted a video afterwards. AISA says she came back without her bag or her phone. The officials have maint...

INDIA alliance to march to the Election Commission on 6 October and hold a Delhi rally on 1 November while the BJP says the campaign is an alibi for expected defeat Image Source: @INCIndia on X India's opposition alliance, led by the Indian National Congress, announced a month-long programme of protests against the Election Commission on Wednesday, after a meeting in New Delhi, and said it wanted future elections conducted with paper ballots rather than electronic voting machines. The INDIA bloc will hold district-level "save democracy" marches and demonstrations outside district magistrates' offices from 2 to 8 October, the Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, noted. Opposition members of parliament will march to the Election Commission on 6 October. Leaders will seek a meeting with the president in the second week of October, five large rallies are planned, and a rally in Delhi on 1 November will focus on what the alliance has displayed its problems with the cu...

BJP leader Smriti Irani challenged the demand to restore 133 million names, arguing that voter-roll revision identified deceased, relocated and duplicate electors File Photo: @smritiirani on X The Bharatiya Janata Party's national general secretary Smriti Irani on Tuesday accused the Congress of attacking India’s Election Commission rather than examining its electoral defeats. This comes as she mounts the ruling party’s principal response to opposition demands for the removal of the country’s chief election official. Irani, a former Union Minister, was responding to a resolution adopted by the Congress Working Committee earlier in the day demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the suspension of the nationwide Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and the restoration of 13.3 crore, or 133 million, names that the party said had been removed. She rejected the Congress’s contention that the revision amounted to mass disenfranchisement, and argue...

India's grand old party's highest decision-making body calls for restoration of 13.3 crore names, days after a newspaper investigation reported dissent inside the Election Commission Image Source: INCIndia on X India's main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, has demanded the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner and the immediate suspension of a nationwide revision of electoral rolls, in a resolution passed by its highest decision-making body. The Congress Working Committee, meeting at the party's headquarters in New Delhi on Tuesday, also called for the restoration of 13 crore 30 lakh names, more than 130 million, which it said had been removed from the rolls through the Special Intensive Revision. The resolution follows an investigation published by The Indian Express last week reporting that two of the three members of the Election Commission had formally objected on record at least 14 times over ten months to decisions taken without their kn...

Opening the Lok Sabha debate on electoral reforms, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi delivered a sharply worded and symbolic address, accusing the Election Commission of India of colluding with those in power and enabling systematic voter suppression under the guise of bureaucratic process.  Image Source: Economic Times Screengrab of Sansad TV Without naming the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise directly in his opening remarks, Rahul Gandhi laid the groundwork for a broader critique of institutional erosion and democratic subversion, framing the vote as the fabric binding 1.4 billion Indians in a shared national project. In a speech rich with metaphor but grounded in political accusation, Rahul Gandhi began with a reference to Mahatma Gandhi’s emphasis on khadi, positioning it as a symbol not merely of resistance but of people’s self-expression and unity.  “Khadi is not just a cloth. Khadi is the expression of the people of India,” he said, before drawing a parall...

In a good beginning to the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections, the first phase of polling across 121 seats on November 6 recorded a voter turnout of 64.66%,  among the highest in the state’s history for an Assembly election.  Image Source: Election Commission of India The previous record was 62.57% set in 2000. This surpasses even Bihar’s Lok Sabha turnout peak of 64.6% in 1998. The Election Commission credited voters and polling staff for the “festive mood” and peaceful conduct. But behind the celebration lies a more complex political terrain shaped by massive voter roll revisions, a fractured political landscape, and strategic voter mobilisation. Electoral Enthusiasm or Statistical Mirage? The turnout spike comes against the backdrop of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls earlier this year, during which 47 lakh names were deleted. The voter base dropped from 7.89 crore to 7.42 crore. The opposition alleged the deletions targeted marginalised and poor communitie...

The political climate in India has further polarised just ahead of voting in Bihar, as Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament of India) and prominent Indian politician Rahul Gandhi accused the ruling BJP of orchestrating what he called “one of the biggest electoral frauds in Indian democratic history.”  Citing what his party calls “H Files” -- a cache of alleged evidence -- Rahul Gandhi claimed that 25 lakh fake votes swung the 2024 Haryana Assembly election, which the BJP narrowly won. Image from LoP Rahul Gandhi's powerful presentation. Via: INC India In an extended presentation in New Delhi, Rahul Gandhi alleged that voter rolls were manipulated at scale. He cited examples of duplicate voter IDs, including 22 instances of a Brazilian model’s photo being used under different names like “Sweety” and “Seema,” and a separate case of one woman’s face appearing on 223 voter IDs across polling booths.  “This isn’t random -- it’s industrialis...

The blood on the streets of Mokama is a mirror held up to the soul of Bihar’s politics -- cracked, dark, and deliberately ignored. Dularchand Yadav, a gangster-turned-politician, was killed while campaigning for change. Let that sink in: the only way change seems possible in Bihar is when it is endorsed by the very muscle that held it hostage for decades. Representational Image: Aravind Varier The killing of Yadav in broad daylight -- shot, run over, and discarded like political waste -- days before the state votes, tells us something Bihar has screamed for years: democracy here survives on life support and it is fed by syndicates and sanctioned by silence. And the real killing is of hope. Every election, Biharis line up hoping for development, for jobs, for law and order. But what do they get? The same recycled strongmen, different scarves. One year they wear saffron, the next red or green. Only the flag changes -- the mafia remains. The Crime-Politics Nexus: Bihar’s Incurable Canc...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman In Bihar’s never-ending political circus, the 2025 Assembly elections have descended into a theatre of implosion, betrayal, and tactical demolition. What was initially thought of as a contest over vision, governance, and employment has degenerated into a free-for-all -- dominated by muscle power, money, and managed failures. Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar. Pic via the former. Let’s not sugarcoat it. The BJP has outsmarted, out-organised, and outmanoeuvred every other party in this election. But its biggest victory is not at the polling booths. It is in the boardrooms of Bihar’s collapsing political alliances -- especially the JDU. With surgical precision, BJP has allowed Nitish Kumar’s party to rot from within, offering just enough rope for it to hang itself. From baffling ticket distributions to social media optics that never translated on the ground, the JDU looks more like a party planning for...

The seven-day deadline set by the Election Commission of India (ECI) for Congress MP and India's Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi to substantiate his allegations of large-scale voter exclusion has lapsed without compliance.  Rahul Gandhi did not submit any signed affidavit or documentary evidence , as was explicitly demanded by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar during a press conference on August 17.  Image Source: INC India The ultimatum, presented in direct response to Gandhi’s public accusation that over 1.5 lakh names had been illegally removed from electoral rolls, was unambiguous: either file a sworn declaration with supporting facts or issue a public apology. As far as the machine-readable voter list is concerned, the Supreme Court has already said in 2019 that this could be a violation of voter privacy. - Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar #BiharSIR2025 | #ElectionCommission | @ECISVEEP | @SpokespersonECI | #GyaneshKumar pic.twitte...