Tens of thousands of people are expected to gather in the national capital on Sunday for a mega rally by the opposition INDIA bloc, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and sweeping electoral reforms, as the confrontation over the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls reaches its most visible moment yet.
The rally, called by the Congress party and backed by the wider opposition alliance, is scheduled to begin around noon with a march from the Minto Road-Connaught Place junction to the Ramlila Maidan grounds in central Delhi. Leaders have claimed that a million people could attend. Delhi Police have given permission for the rally, but with several conditions attached.
The protest is aimed at the voter-list revision exercise that the opposition says has removed around 13 crore names, or roughly 130 million voters, from draft electoral rolls across India. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has described the deletions as amounting to one in every seven Indians, or about 15 per cent of the electorate.
The Election Commission of India says the exercise is designed to update the rolls by removing the names of people who have died or moved away from their registered addresses. Opposition parties allege that the revision could benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party by striking eligible voters off the lists, a charge the Commission and the ruling party reject.
Ahead of the rally, Gandhi framed the protest in the broadest possible terms. He said the demonstration was against what he called the demolition of Indian democracy, and invited everyone who wants to come, political or non-political, to join.
He said there was huge anger and huge emotional pain because millions were being disenfranchised, and added that the opposition was standing together because it was defending the Constitution, the idea of India and the vote, which he described as the expression of all Indians.
Sunday's rally follows a dramatic symbolic protest on Saturday, when the INDIA bloc staged a public impeachment of the Chief Election Commissioner at the residence of Rajya Sabha Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge in New Delhi.
The event, chaired by former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, was attended by leaders from at least 18 parties and Independent Rajya Sabha member Kapil Sibal, along with Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson Sonia Gandhi and senior leaders Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Jairam Ramesh and K. C. Venugopal. After about three hours of speeches, a resolution seeking Kumar's removal was passed unanimously by a show of hands.
At that gathering, Gandhi was unsparing. He described the symbolic impeachment as an extremely dangerous political weapon aimed at those who had colluded to destroy the votes of the Indian people, and said Kumar should be tried for treason in a court of law.
He warned that the opposition would not forgive and forget what he called an assault on the voice of the people, and declared that Kumar would not survive as Chief Election Commissioner because the opposition had enough evidence against him. He added that if the BJP insisted on keeping Kumar after the opposition revealed what it knew, it would be very clear what the ruling party's game was.
Gandhi also used the occasion to question the legitimacy of the 2024 Lok Sabha election itself. He argued that the voters now said to have been deleted had participated in that election, which was decided by a margin of around 3 per cent, and that the Commission was now effectively saying 15 per cent of those voters should never have voted.
On that logic, he said, the Commission itself was stating that the 2024 election was illegal and that the BJP members who entered the Lok Sabha did so illegally. The BJP has dismissed such claims as baseless and politically motivated.
Kharge, for his part, demanded the immediate removal of Kumar and the scrapping of the 2023 law that grants immunity to the Chief Election Commissioner. The Congress president has been at the forefront of the campaign against the revision exercise, and on Saturday he escalated the attack by framing the fight against the revision as a battle to save the vote and save the country.
The controversy intensified in September when The Indian Express reported that Kumar had taken key decisions related to the revision exercise without the agreement of the two other election commissioners, who had raised objections on more than a dozen occasions over the past ten months. Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi were reported to have objected to several orders, most of them concerning the revision process.
The Commission responded that differences of opinion were normal in any institution and did not affect its functioning.
The opposition's campaign has built steadily over recent weeks. Last month, Gandhi led tens of thousands of protesters in a march from Connaught Place to the Supreme Court, seeking the Chief Election Commissioner's resignation. A party leader described that march as just the trailer, and said Sunday's rally would be several times bigger.
Other groups, including the Citizens for Justice and Peace and student organisations, have staged their own protests in Delhi and other cities.
The BJP has pushed back hard against both the rally and its timing. Party leaders criticised the choice of November 1, noting that it is the anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and accused Gandhi of hurting the feelings of victims. The opposition has rejected that criticism, saying the date was chosen for the campaign against the revision exercise and not to make any statement about 1984.
For the INDIA bloc, Sunday's rally is a test of its ability to turn an institutional dispute into a mass movement. The alliance has struggled at times to sustain a common programme, but the voter-roll issue has given it a unifying cause, cutting across regional parties and ideological differences. The presence of leaders from 18 parties at Saturday's symbolic impeachment, and the decision to march together to Ramlila Maidan, are meant to signal that unity to the public.
For the Election Commission, the stakes are equally high. The poll body has defended the revision as a routine and necessary exercise, pointing to Bihar, where it says the process removed the names of deceased, migrated and duplicate voters. But the scale of the deletions claimed by the opposition, and the reported internal disagreements within the Commission, have made it harder for the institution to present the exercise as purely administrative.
What happens after Sunday will depend on the turnout, the response of the authorities and whether the opposition can sustain the momentum. The bloc has already shown it is willing to escalate, from marches to a symbolic impeachment to a mass rally. Its leaders have promised that more evidence will be revealed in the coming days.
The Commission, meanwhile, will be watched closely for any sign that it is willing to revisit the revision process or address the concerns raised by its own commissioners. For millions of voters whose names are at the centre of the dispute, the outcome matters far beyond the politics of a single rally.
(Reporting based on BBC News, Outlook, The New Indian Express and India TV News.)