Congress Rajya Sabha MP Pawan Khera on Monday renewed the Opposition’s attack on the Election Commission of India and chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a report that Karnataka poll officials had filed over 60,000 Form 7 applications seeking the deletion of names from electoral rolls without specifying reasons.
“If this can happen in Karnataka, which has a Congress government, imagine the scale of what could be happening in BJP-ruled states,” Khera wrote in a post on X.
“The ECI can no longer be entrusted with protecting every Indian’s right to vote. Gyanesh Gupta has turned into an instrument of mass disenfranchisement; our democracy is in grave danger,” he added.
According to a report by The Hindu shared by Khera, at least 61,059 Form 7 applications were filed by election officials, but none cited a reason for the proposed deletions, despite this being a mandatory requirement under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) and Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) told the newspaper that the system auto-generated Form 7 objections under their digital signatures when they could not reach voters during hearings on missing electoral-roll mapping or logical discrepancies, marking them “ineligible”.
This meant the officials listed as objectors also decided whether voters should remain on the rolls.
Officials said they had received instructions to seek deletions in cases involving death, underage voters, non-citizenship, duplicate entries or voters who had permanently shifted, but the auto-generated forms left the reason field blank.
The Hindu also reported that Form 7 applications filed by poll officials increased sharply after the claims and objections period ended on September 23, 2026.
While only 192 such applications were received between August 24 and September 23, more than 60,800 were filed after the deadline, between September 24 and October 22.
On October 22, the final day for deciding claims and objections, election officials filed 10,105 Form 7 applications. They had filed 10,314 applications a day earlier, while 11,132 and 11,760 applications were filed on October 17 and 19, respectively.
Rule 17 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, states that any claim or objection not lodged within the prescribed period or in the prescribed form and manner “shall be rejected by the registration officer”.
Karnataka chief minister D.K. Shivakumar had staged a five-hour protest outside the Chief Electoral Officer’s (CEO) office in Bengaluru on October 1 over alleged attempts to wrongly remove voters’ names through bulk Form 7 applications. The CEO subsequently ordered an inquiry.
The Hindu also reported that it had verified the EPIC numbers of several voters on the ECI portal and found that their names had already been deleted from the electoral roll, even though Form 7 applications against them were filed after September 23.
In the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) South electoral district, officials filed 10,374 of the 17,491 Form 7 applications. A similar pattern was seen in at least 26 Assembly constituencies, where EROs and AEROs filed more applications than voters or third parties.
The report also highlighted a discrepancy between the number of Form 7 applications recorded on the ECI website and the figures released by Karnataka’s CEO.
Between September 24 and October 22, the CEO’s office reported 1,70,442 Form 7 applications, while the ECI website listed only 1,56,634—a difference of 13,808 applications, according to the newspaper.
Khera’s remarks came as Rahul Gandhi reached out to Delhi traders on Monday amid concerns over business disruption ahead of the INDIA bloc’s November 1 rally at Ramlila Maidan.
“Tell Modi to sack accused no. 4, Gyanesh Kumar, and the protests will stop in 30 seconds,” Gandhi wrote on X.