The Supreme Court on Thursday, 15 October 2026, issued notice to the Election Commission of India and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on petitions filed by the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, and other opposition leaders challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, according to The Week, Onmanorama, The Wire and BusinessToday. The bench consisted of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.
The court sought responses from the Election Commission and the Chief Election Commissioner and directed that the new petitions be tagged with pleas already pending before it that challenge the validity of the SIR in various states, according to the reports. Tagging means that the petitions will be heard together with the earlier cases. Onmanorama’s report names the Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi as also being served notice, as stated in a search summary of the hearing.
The petitions ask for three main things, according to The Week’s account: an independent audit of the deletions and modifications made during the SIR, safeguards against removing voters from the rolls without notice, and an interim suspension of the revision exercise in all states. The petitions concern large-scale deletions of voters, which the petitioners say happened during the revision, according to the same reports. The Election Commission’s reply to those allegations was not available in the sources reviewed.
The petitioners were not limited to the Congress. The News Minute reports that Rahul Gandhi, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and representatives of other opposition parties were among those who filed the case. The reports reviewed do not list all the petitioners.
The hearing also dealt with a march. The Week’s headline says that the court asked Rahul Gandhi to explain his march, and the reports say that the CJI wanted one of the petitioners to explain his conduct at the next hearing. A march by opposition leaders to the Supreme Court was held on 12 October, after the CJI declined their request for a meeting, as IndiaX24 has reported. IndiaX24 covers the Chief Justice’s remarks about the march in a separate article.
A separate strand of the hearing concerned voter forms. A search summary of the court’s earlier proceedings says that the Supreme Court indicated that it intended to pass directions to resolve voters’ confusion about the use of Form 6 during the SIR in Delhi. IndiaX24 reported on 12 October that the court said it had never ruled on a new Form 6. The sources reviewed for this article do not give the details of the latest directions on the form.
The SIR is a process in which the Election Commission re-verifies the names on the electoral rolls state by state, and IndiaX24 has reported on the dispute between the Commission and the opposition over it in earlier articles. The petitions on 15 October add to the earlier cases; the sources reviewed do not give the number of cases already pending.
Issuing notice is a procedural step and not a ruling on the merits. The Week’s report and The News Minute’s report both note that the court said that issuing notice did not amount to approval of the petitioners’ conduct. The court has not stayed the SIR, and the reports reviewed do not mention an interim order suspending it.
The next hearing date was not given in the sources reviewed. IndiaX24 will report the Election Commission’s response when it is filed.
Image: The Supreme Court of India building in New Delhi (file photo). Photo by Pinakpani, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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