Chandigarh=Respected Justice Hemant Gupta, Justice Pankaj Mithal, Justice B.C. Patel, Justice Subhro Kamal Mukherjee, Justice Permod Kohli, and the thirty-seven other signatories,I have read your letter of 7 October with the respect that your years on the Bench command, and I write in the same spirit.Forty-two is not an idle number. It is the product of six, the highest face of the dice, and seven, which I like to read as satya, truth. In the speculative world, one might say, it is the largest number that signifies truth. Readers of Douglas Adams will also recall it as the answer to life, the universe and everything; I shall settle for the truth about the electoral roll, and take your number as an invitation to engage on it.
Much of what your letter says, I share. Criticism of an institution is a democratic right; denigration is not. An allegation of “vote theft” belongs before a court, on affidavit, not at a press conference. And the Supreme Court did uphold the Special Intensive Revision on 27 May 2026. I said as much myself: I supported the revision as a cleansing of the rolls, and I still do.
What Did Not Come from a Press Conference
Your letter, however, answers the loudest critics and passes over the most serious ones. The concerns that trouble citizens today did not begin at a party podium.
On 5 October 2026 the Supreme Court issued notice on a petition alleging that decisions were taken in the Commission’s name without the concurrence of the two Election Commissioners, and observed that any decision taken neither unanimously nor by majority would have to be explained.
The two Election Commissioners are reported to have recorded fourteen objections between October 2025 and August 2026, among them that Form 6, a form prescribed by statutory rules, was altered without any amendment to those rules.
On 4 October a sitting judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, said that any process which disenfranchises millions of citizens is intrinsically arbitrary and offends Articles 14 and 326.
The Commission itself announced on 26 September that agendas and minutes would henceforth be circulated, and on 1 October ordered a special drive to enrol left-out electors. Institutions do not reform what was never wrong.
Your letter is silent on each of these. You rightly say that constitutional bodies belong to the people and not to any government. For that very reason they are not beyond the scrutiny of the people, and a defence that does not engage the objections of the Commission’s own members is a defence of the institution’s name, not of its conduct.
You also call on constitutional bodies to “remain transparent” and to “address legitimate concerns with clarity”. I ask only that you add your voices to one request: that the Commission publish the minutes and the notes behind those fourteen objections, and let the citizen judge.
A Request, Made with Respect
Between you, you hold several centuries of service on the Bench. Many of you will have written, in your time, the judgments that are the real defence of constitutional institutions: those in which a court told the executive, Union or State, that it had gone beyond what the Constitution allows. I request each of you to share three such judgments of your own, the ones you count among your best, in which you upheld the Constitution against executive overreach.
Nobody’s credentials are in question here. Such a list would simply show the citizen what your letter assumes: that those who now defend an institution have also, when duty called, checked one. Trust in the courts was earned by judges who were willing to say no to power. That record, placed beside your letter, would carry more weight than any number of signatures.
I make this request in a spirit of fair exchange, for I have not hesitated to disagree with judgments of the signatories myself. In Harbhajan Singh v. State of Haryana, decided on 20 September 2022, a bench of Justice Hemant Gupta and Justice Vikram Nath, in a judgment written by Justice Gupta, upheld the Haryana Sikh Gurdwara (Management) Act, 2014. In my view, which I set out in The KBS Chronicle in May 2023 under the title Did the Supreme Court err in the SGPC-Haryana Case?, the Court erred. Since the reorganisation of 1 November 1966, the Sikh Gurdwaras Act, 1925 has been amended only by Parliament, for Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, and a State law that received only the Governor’s assent should not have been allowed to carve a separate body out of it. The Court held otherwise, finding that the Union’s power under the Punjab Reorganisation Act, 1966 was transitional and that no Presidential assent was required. I accept that judgment as the law of the land even as I disagree with it. That is the distinction I would ask your letter to observe: between disagreement, which is the citizen’s right, and denigration, which neither of us defends.
On one point there is no quarrel between us. As your letter puts it: “Do not let anyone convince you that your vote is meaningless.” That is why my own advice to every voter left off the roll remains unchanged: file Form 6, and do not wait for the debate to end, or the last date for claims and objections to expire.
With respect and regards,
KBS Sidhu