Now, Opposition plans to send its letter on SIR, ECI role to all Supreme Court judges

TMC leader Derek O’Brien said the Opposition was discussing a plan to circulate the letter to all SC judges since they hadn’t received a response from the CJI

Opposition parties are considering circulating the letter they had written to the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant last month among all Supreme Court judges to highlight their grievances against the Election Commission of India (ECI) and other poll-related issues.

Twenty-three opposition parties, including the DMK and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), along with independent MP Kapil Sibal, sent a letter to CJI Surya Kant dated June 28, raising concerns over what they described as the partisan role of the Election Commission and the flawed Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

In the letter, the Opposition accused ECI of acting in a “brazen” and “biased” manner during the SIR, claiming that the exercise was rushed, poorly implemented and disenfranchised lakhs of voters, putting the country’s democratic process “in jeopardy”.

Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member Derek O’Brien said the opposition parties were discussing a plan to circulate the letter to all SC judges. “We didn’t receive any reply from the CJI so the letter would be circulated among a wider section of the judges,” he said.

Asked what purpose this would serve when the Opposition has already made the letter public, O’Brien said, “There is a big, political difference between making the letter public on social media and sending a copy of the letter to each SC judge.”

Apart from CJI Kant, the Supreme Court currently has 34 judges.

The six-page letter criticised the SIR exercise, saying the ECI justified it as a measure to improve the integrity of electoral rolls, but the outcome had been the opposite.

The letter also accused ECI of arbitrarily deleting large numbers of names from electoral rolls and criticised the deployment of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) during elections in West Bengal.

It said around 3.5 lakh CAPF personnel were deployed during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, including about 2.4 lakh in West Bengal. “It was apparent that the West Bengal Government was under siege with the presence of 2 lakh 40 thousand CAPF personnel,” the parties said.

Questioning the appointment process of election commissioners, the Opposition alleged, “Since 2014, almost every appointment made by the government has been of persons closely associated with it and seen to be doing the bidding of the government, brazenly, to manipulate the outcome of election results.”

That the DMK and AAP also signed the June 28 letter was considered significant since both parties have distanced themselves from the Congress-led INDIA bloc in recent months. Lok Sabha MP Hanuman Beniwal’s Rashtriya Loktantrik Party (RLP), however, did not sign the letter.

AAP exited the INDIA alliance in 2025 after contesting the Lok Sabha elections as part of the Opposition grouping. The DMK walked out of the bloc last month after the Congress decided to support C Joseph Vijay’s TVK government in Tamil Nadu.

Saubhadra Chatterji is Deputy Political Editor at the Hindustan Times. He writes on both politics and policies.