Demands for the removal of India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar are growing, and an old closed case against him is being reopened.
The campaign to remove him, which began on Gandhi Jayanti, continued on Sunday. On Friday the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) held a “jail bharo” protest at Shivaji Park, backed by the Thackeray cousins, Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena leader Raj Thackeray. On Sunday the Thackerays led a march in Mumbai demanding Kumar’s resignation, and the crowd of more than 100,000 brought the city to a standstill and halted traffic.
The march, called the Virat Garjana Morcha, ran from the Metro Cinema junction in south Mumbai to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation building. Congress leaders Balasaheb Thorat and Vijay Wadettiwar, NCP (Sharad Pawar) leaders Jayant Patil and Shashikant Shinde and many others took part. They said that five months after the BJP’s setback in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the commission added 6 million voters before the Maharashtra assembly election to help the BJP take power, and has now removed 20 million names from the rolls in the name of the special intensive revision (SIR).
As the campaign spreads, there are also efforts to pursue him legally. Kerala’s Congress-led government has moved to reopen a case at least 20 years old. In mid-2006, a Malaysian-Indian joint venture, Pati-BEL, built a 245km road in the state, and part of its payment was allegedly withheld after the work was finished. Its project manager, Malaysian civil engineer Lee See Bin, later died by suicide while trying to recover the money; he allegedly accused Gyanesh Kumar, then the state’s public works secretary, of harassment in a note. A vigilance inquiry was opened but soon stopped.
Kerala’s public works minister, Ramesh Chennithala, has ordered the investigation reopened. The state government says Kumar faced allegations of criminal conduct over the award of public contracts as works secretary, but the inquiry stalled because he was influential, and he later moved on deputation to the defence ministry.
A 2023 law passed by the Modi government protects the chief election commissioner and the other two commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, from criminal or civil cases over election decisions, but it does not apply to an investigation into events in 2006.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report