New Delhi saw an unusual piece of political theatre on Saturday when former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar took the chair at a mock parliament organised by the opposition INDIA bloc, which passed a symbolic resolution to "impeach" Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The event, held on the lawns of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge's official residence at 10, Rajaji Marg, was staged to resemble a joint sitting of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, complete with a presiding officer, a motion, speeches and a vote by show of hands.
Meira Kumar, who is eighty-one and served as Speaker of the Lok Sabha between 2009 and 2014 during the second term of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, returned to the presiding officer's role with the measured style that had marked her years in the chair. Her opening address lasted about six minutes, and she then invited Kharge, the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, to table the motion against the Chief Election Commissioner.
The start was not entirely smooth. The microphones were not switched on when Meira Kumar rose to speak, an awkward beginning that drew attention because the opposition has frequently accused the current Speaker, Om Birla, of keeping opposition microphones muted during heated exchanges. Once the sound was restored, the proceedings settled into a deliberate imitation of Parliament, with opposition MPs, leaders and civil society members taking part.
Kharge spoke for about thirty minutes and laid out six charges against Gyanesh Kumar, demanding that he be tried for treason. The central accusation was that the Election Commission, under Kumar, had facilitated the deletion of voters' names from electoral rolls and thereby helped to steal elections. The bloc has pointed in particular to the Special Intensive Revision of voter lists, claiming that 13.2 crore voters were deleted through the exercise.
The resolution also accused the Commissioner of acting at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, charges the government and the Election Commission have rejected in the past.
Voters who said their names had been removed from the rolls also gave accounts during the proceedings, a feature the organisers presented as evidence for the charges. The motion was seconded by Samajwadi Party leader Harendra Malik and supported by Rahul Gandhi and other opposition MPs. When the resolution was put to a vote, it was adopted unanimously by a show of hands, with Meira Kumar declaring that Gyanesh Kumar was unfit to continue as Chief Election Commissioner.
"I am surprised," Meira Kumar said during the proceedings. "I served as Speaker for five years, but I have never witnessed a gathering where there wasn't even a single voice of dissent." The remark drew attention because the unanimity of the gathering was, by design, the point of the exercise: the event was organised by the opposition, for the opposition, and no voice from the ruling side was present to disagree.
The most talked-about detail of the day, however, was not the motion itself but the chair in which Meira Kumar sat. Congress media and publicity department head Pawan Khera, who helped organise the event, revealed afterwards that the chair had once been occupied by Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister.
"The chair on which Meira Kumar sat during today's public impeachment proceedings against the CEC was once occupied by the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, the great-grandfather of Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi," Khera wrote on X.
"It was Nehru Ji's chair throughout his tenure as prime minister," Khera added. "It witnessed some of the most consequential decisions in our nation's history and carries the weight of that legacy." He said that sitting in that chair, and invoking the spirit of Nehru, Meira Kumar had pronounced Gyanesh Kumar unfit to continue in office.
The symbolism was plainly deliberate: the opposition sought to wrap its protest in the authority of the country's first prime minister and the early years of the republic.
The reaction from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was swift and scornful. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra accused the opposition of making a mockery of Parliament and democracy, and took a swipe at Rahul Gandhi, suggesting that the bloc might as well make him a mock prime minister. The BJP has consistently defended the Special Intensive Revision as a legitimate exercise to clean up voter lists, and has dismissed the opposition's allegations of vote theft as baseless.
Rahul Gandhi, for his part, described the proceedings as a political weapon against those who, he alleged, had colluded to destroy people's votes. Congress leaders said the event was not meant to carry any legal force — a "public impeachment" has no standing under the Constitution, since the removal of a Chief Election Commissioner requires a parliamentary process — but to register a public verdict ahead of a larger mobilisation.
That mobilisation was already under way. The symbolic impeachment came a day before the INDIA bloc's mega rally at Ramlila Maidan in Delhi on Sunday, November 1, where opposition leaders planned to intensify their pressure for the Commissioner's removal and raise concerns about the revision of electoral rolls.
Posters for the "Chalo Delhi" call had dominated parts of the capital in the days before the rally, and supporters from different states had begun arriving for the show of strength.
The episode underlines how central the Election Commission has become to the opposition's politics. The controversy over voter lists has run for months, with the opposition alleging large-scale deletions and the Commission insisting that the revision is a routine, transparent exercise. Saturday's mock parliament was the opposition's attempt to give that argument a dramatic form, borrowing the language and rituals of Parliament itself.
Whether the theatre changes any minds remains an open question. For supporters, the image of a former Speaker presiding from Nehru's chair gave the protest a dignity and a historical resonance that a street demonstration could not. For critics, it was an exercise in self-parody, a Parliament without an opposition to itself.
What is certain is that the chair, the Speaker and the charges will all feature prominently in the speeches at Ramlila Maidan, as the bloc tries to carry the momentum of Saturday's symbolic sitting into Sunday's rally and beyond.
(Reporting based on NDTV, The Times of India and The Hindu.)