Not the usual internal notes that stay inside the building, but actual letters that went out to the Cabinet Secretary. Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, both Election Commissioners, put their worries down on paper on 29 July and sent them straight to T.V. Somanathan. The RTI papers finally showed us what they wrote, and it is hard not to sit with it for a bit.
Here is what happened, as far as the documents go. Bhanu Prakash Yeturu, the man looking after administration, went on leave. Maneesh Garg stepped in as the temporary link officer. Within hours he put out a new work-allocation order. It shifted who handled what among the senior people, including the ones dealing with the IT side of the electoral rolls. Sandhu wrote that nobody had discussed this with the Commission or with him. Joshi said the same, and added that when he asked for the file, it simply was not given. Both of them pointed to the 2023 law that is supposed to guide how the Commission works and asked for something to be done.
What stays with me is the path they took. They did not just raise it inside. They wrote to the Cabinet Secretary. That choice says a lot about how things must have felt at the time. When two of the three people who make up the Commission decide they need to step outside to flag an administrative step, something is off.
The Cabinet Secretariat looked at the letters and decided not to move further. The notings say the communications came from the two Commissioners in their personal capacity, not as a formal view of the whole body. Acting on them, they felt, could look like the executive poking into a constitutional institution. So they acknowledged the letters, marked copies to the Chief Election Commissioner and the Department of Personnel, and left it there. On paper it makes sense. In real life it left the concerns sitting on the record with no outside follow-up.
Around the same period Sanjay Kumar, the Deputy Election Commissioner who had been handling the electoral roll and IT work, was sent back to his parent cadre in Delhi. The papers say it was on personal grounds. The timing, right after the order that changed how files from the IT division moved, still sits awkwardly. The Election Commission has said the disputed order was never actually put into practice once the two Commissioners objected. That may well be true. The sequence still leaves a few questions hanging.
For anyone who watches how these institutions run, the whole episode brings up ordinary thoughts. How does a body like the Election Commission deal with differences when the people at the top are not on the same page about process? What happens when someone on temporary charge issues orders that senior members say were never talked through? And where does a regular person look for clarity when the public papers show two Election Commissioners felt they had to write outside?
Transparency did a bit of the work. Commodore Lokesh Batra’s RTI application brought the letters and the file notings into the open. Without that we would still be going by newspaper stories and careful official statements. The reply does not give every single page, but it is enough to see the trail: the date of the letters, the officer named, the measured response from the Secretariat, and the decision to leave the matter inside the Commission.
I am not pretending to know the full internal picture. Places like this have their own pressures and ways of working. What I do know is that when people at that level start writing outside normal channels about basic administrative steps, the rest of us have a right to notice. The independence of the Election Commission is not just a line in a law book. It is something people feel when they check their name on the voter list or stand in a queue on polling day. Any sense that internal processes are being stretched without proper talk chips away at that quiet trust.
The Commission has given its side. The orders were not implemented. The letters were about an officer on deputation, not about policy. All right. Still, the fact that two Commissioners felt they needed to write those letters is now part of the record. So is the Cabinet Secretariat’s choice to stay out of it, citing the Commission’s constitutional status.
In the end this is less about one officer or one set of orders and more about how a key institution handles disagreement. The RTI papers do not fix anything. They just let us see what was written and how it was received. For a country that needs the Election Commission to stay above the usual noise, that kind of visibility is useful. It reminds us that even these bodies are made of people who sometimes feel they have to put their concerns in writing and send them outside the building.
Sources: RTI reply obtained by Commodore Lokesh K. Batra (Retd.); coverage in The Wire, The Indian Express, Business Standard, The Times of India and Hindustan Times on the July 2026 letters and what followed.
Publisher By – Rohit Manral
Written By – Anjali Pandey