Kiren Rijiju, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister, fired a sharp rhetorical salvo at the Congress party on Tuesday, demanding answers to five pointed questions that link the party’s electoral defeats to the appointment timeline of Election Commissioners. The challenge lands in the middle of a boiling dispute over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, a process the opposition claims is rigged to delete legitimate voters while retaining ineligible ones.
The core of Rijiju’s argument hinges on a simple, uncomfortable logic for the Grand Old Party. If the election machinery was biased against Congress in 2014 and 2024, why did the party lose so decisively when the Chief Election Commissioner was not Gyanesh Kumar? He asked how Congress won only 44 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 when Commissioners were appointed by a government that allegedly favored them. He pressed further: why did they face what he called a 'heavy defeat' in 2024, a year before Gyanesh Kumar took the CEC chair? The questions are designed to trap the opposition in a logical corner: either the election system is fair, or Congress was incompetent regardless of who was in charge.
Rijiju didn’t stop at history. He turned the lens on the current voter list cleanup, asking whether names of illegal immigrants, dead voters, and duplicates should be removed or kept. He listed past SIR exercises from 1952 to 2004, asking if those were illegal too. The subtext is clear: the opposition is attacking a standard democratic hygiene process, not a partisan weapon. He concluded by labeling the Congress a 'one family party' collaborating with 'outside forces' to destroy the Constitution.
The political fallout is already accelerating. The INDIA bloc is organizing a 'public impeachment' of CEC Gyanesh Kumar today at Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence in Delhi. They intend to present what they call proof of 'vote theft' to President Droupadi Murmu in a fresh meeting. But the real test comes next month. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has called for a mega 'Chalo Dilli' march on November 1, 2026, at Ramlila Maidan, aiming to turn the SIR controversy into a mass movement against the Election Commission.