Four major Left parties in Odisha have demanded the immediate dismissal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing him of running the Election Commission of India as a one-man office and undermining public faith in the voter list.
The call came on Friday after a joint meeting of the state leadership of the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation and the All India Forward Bloc at Bhagabati Bhawan, the CPI state office.
Their target is not only the man at the top of the three-member poll panel. The parties also want the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls stopped at once, the names of voters they say were wrongly struck off restored, and the present appointment system for Election Commissioners replaced by a selection committee proposed earlier by the Supreme Court — comprising the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India.
What triggered the meeting
The spark was an investigative report in *The Indian Express* on Sept 23. The newspaper reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected, on record, at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders on voter registration, deletion and restoration of names, changes to Form 6, and the handling of the electoral-roll database. Several of those notes, the report said, alleged that steps were taken without their knowledge.
The Odisha Left parties framed the same dispute in their own language: two of the three Commissioners raised objections “at least 10 times” on registration, deletion, re-inclusion and the conduct of SIR, yet the Chief Election Commissioner, they said, still took decisions unilaterally. Those decisions, they argued, “are not legally valid.”
The Election Commission has not accepted that reading. In its first public response to the investigation, the poll body did not dispute the existence of the notes but described them as part of the “decision-making process” and said decisions of the past year were unanimous.
The Left parties were unconvinced. Published facts, they said, confirm concerns long raised by opposition parties and civil society groups and expose “the lack of transparency in the conduct of SIR and the management of electoral rolls.”
Why Odisha is in the argument
SIR is not an abstract national quarrel in the state. Odisha’s revision ended this week. Before the exercise began, the state had about 3.34 crore electors. The draft roll published on July 5 listed 3.13 crore names after more than 20 lakh deletions at the draft stage. The final roll, published on September 21, stood at 3,16,32,754 electors — a net contraction of about 17.67 lakh names, or roughly 5.3 per cent, lower than several other SIR states but still large enough to fuel a political fight.
The Biju Janata Dal and Congress had already questioned the deletions, especially of migrant and seasonally absent voters. Friday’s Left meeting placed that local unease inside a larger claim: that a voter list depending on “processes under centralised control” cannot command public confidence.
Nationally, opposition parties have used the Express report to shift their attack from the Commission as a whole to the Chief Election Commissioner personally, demanding Kumar’s removal, a pause in SIR and court scrutiny of how the panel has functioned. Congress units protested in several cities on Friday, including outside the Chief Electoral Officer’s office in Bhubaneswar, where state Congress president Bhakta Charan Das was detained.
The protest calendar
The four parties have instructed their units across Odisha to run week-long protest programmes from Sept 26 to Oct 2. That timetable matches the national Left call issued a day earlier by CPI, CPI(M), CPI(ML) Liberation, the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the All India Forward Bloc.
The first public show of force in the capital will be a joint demonstration at 11 AM on Saturday, Sept 26, at Master Canteen Square. The parties have invited “all secular, democratic Left, opposition parties and civil society organisations” to join, and they have asked their units to organise similar protests across the state.
Friday’s meeting was attended by CPI State Secretary Dr. Prasanta Kumar Mishra, CPI(M) State Secretary Suresh Panigrahi, CPI(ML) Liberation State Secretary Yudhishthir Mohapatra and All India Forward Bloc State General Secretary Jyotiranjan Mohapatra, along with senior leaders Ashish Kanungo, N. Narayan Reddy, Jayanta Das, Badri Narayan Dash and Bansidhar Parida.
What hangs in the balance
At the heart of the dispute is a simple constitutional question the parties put in political language: can the world’s largest electoral machinery be run if two of its three statutory members say they were kept in the dark?
The Left answer is no. They argue that the right to vote cannot rest on a process that looks opaque, centralised and dependent on a single office. Restore the deleted, stop SIR, change how Commissioners are chosen, and remove the Chief Election Commissioner — that is the package they will carry to Master Canteen Square on Saturday morning.
