By John J. Kennedy
Is disagreement between commissioners actually a problem? Not necessarily. Disagreement can even be healthy. However, the real issue is Sandhu and Joshi say they weren’t told about major decisions in the first place, and once they objected, there was no clear process for what should happen next.
We usually talk about election transparency in one direction: how much does the election commission tell citizens? How much does it tell political parties? How much does it explain to courts and journalists? That’s the normal frame, and more often than not, the right one. But a new set of disclosures out in the public domain raises a different question. How much does the election commission tell itself?
An investigation by The Indian Express reports that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, raised at least 14 formal objections over 10 months. Their complaints covered several issues: the addition and deletion of voters, changes to Form 6, access to the electoral database, and the functioning of the commission’s own IT systems. More than once, they said decisions had been made without their knowledge. Should two sitting commissioners have to learn about major decisions from the media?
Unfortunately, that’s what Sandhu reportedly said happened in April. He learned about new IT modules and portals only after they had already been built. Joshi later raised a separate concern: the electoral roll database was becoming more centralised, with fewer people able to see how it was managed. He proposed, and rightly so, an internal audit to check this. Sandhu supported the idea. Then, by his own account, he was never told what happened to the proposal after that.
Now, let us pause here for a moment.
Is disagreement between commissioners actually a problem? Not necessarily. Obviously, three people appointed to run a national institution won’t agree on everything, and there’s no reason they should. Disagreement can even be healthy; it can mean that someone inside the system is asking hard questions before the public has to. However, the real issue isn’t that Sandhu and Joshi disagreed with decisions. It’s that they say they weren’t told about those decisions in the first place, and once they objected, there was no clear process for what should happen next.
This is certainly a serious problem. An institution can tolerate disagreement and still function well, as long as there is a way to raise concerns, get a response, and reach some resolution. What the report suggests is different: a commissioner records an objection, and then hears nothing more about it. What happens to the objection or the disagreement? It simply disappears into thin air?
One must also understand the extremely serious nature of the issue, as it extends beyond the commission’s internal workings, given what’s actually at stake right now.
Why the revelations matter
The election commission is in the middle of a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, a process that has already affected more than 13 crore names across 30 states and union territories at the draft stage. If a name is wrongly added or removed during this exercise, the consequences are severe. A person who is otherwise fully eligible to vote may simply not appear on the list on election day. There’s no appeal process available to someone who doesn’t even know they’ve been dropped. So when the officials who are supposed to approve and oversee this exercise say they don’t have full visibility into how it’s being run, that’s not a small administrative complaint – that is the epicentre of the whole story.
Besides, there is also a technical reason why this is harder to catch now than it used to be. In the past, decisions left a paper trail. A file moved from one officer’s desk to another. Someone signed an order, and if something went wrong, you could trace exactly who approved what and when. Digital systems don’t work the same way. Access to a database can be enabled or disabled using a login credential. A new feature or module can be built and deployed without anyone outside the technical team knowing it exists. A workflow can be redesigned so that one official can act on a system and another can’t, and there’s no single visible record of that change unless someone specifically documents it.
This means that in a digital system, “who has access to what” is itself a decision with consequences, and if that decision is made quietly, by a small group, then people who are formally responsible for oversight can be left out without anyone technically breaking a rule.
According to the expose, the disagreement escalated beyond internal notes. The two commissioners approached Cabinet Secretary T.V. Somanathan over an administrative order that they believed would further concentrate control of the IT division in fewer hands. They later withdrew that order themselves. Why did resolving an internal dispute require going to the cabinet secretary? Why didn’t the commission’s own internal process handle it? Those questions haven’t been answered publicly, and they’re worth asking directly rather than assuming an answer.
A caveat
Amidst all of this, a fair caveat is needed here. This entire account rests on one investigation. The election commission hasn’t given its own detailed version of these events, at least not one that’s been reported as extensively. All it has said is that it is a “multi-member” constitutional body, and that all its actions have been in accordance with the laws and instructions of the commission. The ECI’s statement also makes light of the concerns raised and puts them under the umbrella of ‘operational queries or inputs’ at the draft stages.
It’s possible that some of what looks like exclusion was intended as a security measure: limiting who has access to the database is, in some contexts, a reasonable practice, not a cover-up. Without the commission’s own detailed account, it’s hard to rule that out completely.
But even with that caveat in mind, the basic pattern reported is still worth taking seriously: officials responsible for a decision say they didn’t have the information needed to make it, and when they asked for a review process, they say they didn’t get a clear answer.
