Speaking to after submitting the complaint, Moitra questioned the legal immunity granted to the Chief Election Commissioner under the Chief Election Commissioner and other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023, asserting that protection from prosecution only applies when the Commission acts collectively as a multi-member body.
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“I have come today to the Parliament Street Police Station and given a complaint to the police station here against ‘Chor’ Gyanesh Kumar, who is the Chief Election Commissioner of this country. And apparently he enjoys immunity under the CEC and EC Act of 2023, Section 16, which says that the Election Commissioners enjoy immunity from civil and criminal prosecution in the discharge of their duties. I’d like to point out that if acting as a concerted body, they may enjoy immunity,” Moitra told ANI.
Citing a recent investigative report, the Krishnanagar MP claimed that internal dissent within the Election Commission of India (ECI) showed that decisions were being taken unilaterally rather than by consensus or majority.
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“In this case, the Indian Express investigation has made it very clear that two of the three election commissioners, namely Mr. Sandhu and Mr. Joshi, dissented as many as 14 times in the last 10 months and sometimes as many as four times in a single day. They knew nothing about this. So all the decisions taken by Gyanesh Kumar were certainly not majority decisions. They were the decisions conveyed on behalf of the Election Commission that were actually falsified because they were done by one person without the consent of the other two. Hence, he cannot enjoy immunity and is open to prosecution-that is very clear in the interpretation of the law,” she alleged.Elaborating on the specifics of the alleged electoral irregularities, the TMC lawmaker accused the top poll official of tampering with the voter registration process and keeping ground-level field officers in the dark.
“Very important things like the crores of new voters were not being allowed to come on the list because of the addition of a new question on Form 6, the new voters list. And we now find that the two other election commissioners had said this is completely illegal; still, the question linking parentage was put in. We find how the EROs and the BLOs and the ground-level officials were not kept in the loop and denied access to the software, and Seema Khanna, who was DGIT, along with Gyanesh Kumar, played with the software from the back end to manipulate voter lists while keeping EROs and block-level officials in the dark. This is a very serious charge,” Moitra said.
She further claimed that over 30 lakh valid voters were excluded in West Bengal through arbitrary appellate procedures without institutional authorization.
“The third, for example, in Bengal, 33 lakh valid voters were on the list, but the EC did appeals against them. When Mr. Sandhu said, ‘Who has filed these appeals? The EC hasn’t done it,’ Gyanesh Kumar had no answer and the CEO of West Bengal had no answer, but these 33 lakh voters were kept off the list. This is criminal till we solve this,” the TMC MP added.
These remarks came after The Indian Express published a fresh media report stating that the Goa Chief Electoral Officer wrote to Delhi eight times in seven days, asking for that access to be enabled, but all in vain.
This media report follows the earlier one, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders related to the SIR process.
