Rawat.
When Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi found that their objections were not heard, especially regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, they should not have stopped at dissent notes, said former Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Instead, the two ECs should have ensured that all decisions taken against their will were annulled at the very next meeting of the three-member Commission, he said.
Slamming the way the SIR has been carried out, Mr. Rawat noted, in an exclusive interview with The Hindu on Wednesday (September 30, 2026), that this is the first time since Independence that so many eligible electors had lost their voting rights.
“The Chief Election Commissioner himself does not have any veto. Absolutely not. That is something very serious for a democracy,” he pointed out.
“93% of the deleted voters whose appeals have been decided by the tribunals were found eligible, and they missed exercising their voting right in the elections.
He is equivalent to the other Commissioners,” he said. On the SIR process in West Bengal, he said the damage had already been done before the Assembly election.
“They had the majority [in the ECI]. In the very next meeting, when their first objections were not heard, they should have annulled all the decisions taken against which they had an opinion. They should have taken the right decision, which would have prevailed. Every week, a day was fixed for it, and additional meetings were also held. Asked how Commissioners arrive at a consensus, Mr.
So obviously, they did not take that route,” the former CEC said. Describing the ECI’s functioning, the former CEC said that Commission meetings were usually held very regularly. “All kinds of permutations and combinations were used to ensure that decisions were quick, efficient, and nothing suffered because of pending decisions,” he said. Rawat said that when the members are not on the same page, meetings help them understand each other’s point of view and bring about an agreement. In the “one in a million” occasions where consensus cannot be reached, he said, there is the recourse of voting, where the majority opinion prevails.
