New Delhi : Following reports of internal discord within the Election Commission and protests across the country against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, a significant revelation has emerged. According to information obtained via an RTI (Right to Information) request, the Cabinet Secretariat forwarded letters written by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi to the Cabinet Secretary regarding the alleged misconduct of Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Manish Garg directly to the office of CEC Gyanesh Kumar. It has also been revealed that the Cabinet Secretariat took no action on these complaints.

File notings obtained under the Right to Information (RTI) Act indicate that the Cabinet Secretariat had proposed seeking the CEC’s opinion on these letters. Documents received in response to an RTI application filed by RTI activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd.) have brought several other crucial details to light. Regarding the complaints from the Election Commissioners, the Secretariat noted that these were made in their personal capacity; as no official communication had been received on behalf of the Election Commission as a whole, taking any action at this stage would be inappropriate.

According to the records, on August 3, the Secretariat proposed seeking the opinion of CEC Gyanesh Kumar. A note dated August 4 stated that the letters from the two Election Commissioners were sent in their “personal capacity” rather than as a formal directive from the Election Commission. The Secretariat emphasized that any action that could be perceived as “interference” in a constitutional body should be avoided. Subsequently, on August 5, the Cabinet Secretariat merely informed the two Commissioners that their letter had been received.

Copies of this communication were also sent to the Secretary of the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), other officials, and the Private Secretary to the CEC. Lokesh Batra filed an RTI application on September 24. The responses received reveal that on July 29, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi sent two separate, yet nearly identical, letters to the country’s top bureaucrat, T.V. Somanathan. Attached to Sukhbir Sandhu’s letter was a copy of an order issued on July 28 by Manish Garg, in which Garg had delineated the distribution of work among himself and other Election Commission officials. Now, let us examine why the Election Commissioners raised a complaint in the first place.

The entire controversy stems from the routing of files within the IT department and the allocation of responsibilities. In the confidential letters sent to the Cabinet Secretary on July 29, both Commissioners alleged that on July 28 while Deputy Election Commissioner (DEC) Bhanu Prakash Yeturu was on leave Manish Garg was given additional charge of the Administration Department.

Within hours of assuming this charge, Garg issued an order reallocating the duties of senior officials, including Director General (IT) Seema Khanna. The Commissioners argued that they were not consulted on this matter, as required under Sections 18(1) and 18(2) of the CEC/EC Act, 2023. Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi further alleged that a file he had requested from the department was not made available to him.

This revelation comes at a time when the Election Commission’s IT department and its head, Seema Khanna are at the center of a significant debate. According to recent media reports, a new IT system implemented by Seema Khanna and approved by the Election Commission severely restricted the access of Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) the officials responsible for adding or removing names from the electoral rolls to the database. This sparked considerable controversy and brought Seema Khanna into the spotlight.

These details were disclosed in a special report by The Indian Express. Reports also claimed that Election Commissioners Sandhu and Joshi had expressed disagreement with the Chief Election Commissioner’s decisions 14 times over the past ten months, yet decisions were taken by sidelining them. However, the Election Commission has rejected all these claims. The Commission stated that the ECI makes all its decisions in accordance with the rules either by consensus or by a majority vote.

Report : Abhijit Tushar Bhatt (Political Editor)