There is something odd about how we talk about the Election Commission of India. We speak about the ECI as though it is a single voice a unified authority that issues decisions on elections, Model Code of Conduct violations, and electoral disputes as if from one undivided mind. But the Commission has not been a one-person institution since 1989. It has three members: the Chief Election Commissioner and two Election Commissioners. And yet, when we ask whether those three members are actually allowed to disagree with each other whether internal dissent is even a constitutional possibility within the ECI the answer is surprisingly unclear.

That question stopped being theoretical in 2019, when Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa reportedly dissented from the majority decisions of the Commission which were granting clean chits to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah on Model Code of Conduct complaints, and the institutional dimensions of what occurred were genuinely troubling. Lavasa's dissenting notes were apparently not being recorded in the Commission's official orders. He then began boycotting full-bench meetings on MCC complaints, cited this as his reason, and eventually resigned from the Commission in August 2020 to join the Asian Development Bank. Whether that exit was entirely voluntary is something that cannot be established with certainty. But the damage to institutional credibility had already been done quietly, and without any real public reckoning.

The episode left a constitutional question hanging in the air that nobody seemed particularly interested in answering: what is the legal status of dissent within the Election Commission of India?

What Article 324 Does and Does Not Say

Article 324(1) vests the superintendence, direction, and control of the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of all elections in the Election Commission. Article 324(2) says the Commission shall consist of the Chief Election Commissioner and “such number of other Election Commissioners, if any, as the President may from time to time fix.” That phrase “if any” is worth pausing on. It tells us something about what the Constitution's framers imagined: a single-member body as the baseline, with additional members being optional rather than constitutionally mandated. Multiple commissioners were permitted, not required.

What the Constitution does not say and this is where the problem starts is anything about how the Commission is supposed to function when it has multiple members. There is nothing about majority decisions, nothing about quorum, nothing about whether dissenting opinions need to be recorded or published. The entire internal procedure of the ECI as a collegiate body is constitutionally unaddressed.

This gap was perhaps tolerable when the Commission functioned as a one-person institution, which it did for most of India's post-independence history. The two-member expansion happened in 1989, during R.V.S. Peri Sastri's tenure, in circumstances that themselves were not entirely uncomplicated. Then came T.N. Seshan, who transformed public perceptions of the ECI through sheer assertiveness but Seshan clashed bitterly and publicly with the two Election Commissioners who had been appointed alongside him, at least partly as institutional counterweights. The ECI's internal tensions during that period were real and visible, but they were never constitutionally addressed. By the time Lavasa's dissent became an issue, that gap had been sitting in Article 324 for thirty years, untouched.

The Asymmetry That Makes Dissent Structurally Risky

Article 324(5) protects the Chief Election Commissioner from removal except through the same procedure as the removal of a Supreme Court judge a Special Majority address of Parliament. This is a substantial constitutional shield, designed to insulate the CEC from executive pressure.

Election Commissioners, however, have no equivalent protection. They can be removed on the recommendation of the CEC. That asymmetry is the structural heart of the problem. A Commissioner who consistently disagrees with the CEC on sensitive or politically significant decisions is, formally speaking, at the CEC's mercy when it comes to the question of continued tenure.

Now, one must be careful here it would be unfair to suggest that this power has been routinely or dramatically misused. But even the mere existence of this asymmetry creates what institutional law scholars sometimes describe as a chilling effect. If an Election Commissioner knows, however implicitly, that sustained dissent against the CEC can result in a removal recommendation from the very person they are disagreeing with, that knowledge will shape and perhaps suppress how they express minority views. This is not a hypothetical concern. The Lavasa episode suggested it is a real one.

The Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India (2023) Constitution Bench judgment was a significant step in addressing at least part of this problem. A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, exercising the power under Article 142 pending legislation, directed that the selection committee for the CEC and ECs include the Chief Justice of India alongside the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to ensure the executive did not exercise sole control over who gets appointed. showed how seriously the Court took the independence question. But even this landmark decision did not engage with the internal dimension what happens inside the Commission after the members have been selected and have to make decisions together.

The 2023 Act: A Missed Opportunity

Parliament's legislative response to the Anoop Baranwal judgment was the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023. It was controversial from the moment it was introduced, because the Act removed the Chief Justice of India from the selection committee and replaced that position with a Union Cabinet Minister. This effectively reinstated the executive's near complete dominance over appointments, despite the Court's stated concern about exactly that. But apart from the appointment controversy, the Act also missed a more basic opportunity. It says nothing about internal deliberation procedures within the Commission. It does not require dissenting opinions to be recorded. It does not address the removal asymmetry between the CEC and Election Commissioners in any meaningful way. The legislation that was supposed to operationalise a landmark judgment on ECI independence simply did not engage with what independence looks like inside the Commission itself.

Why the Dissent Record Matters

There is a principle that runs through almost every functioning collegiate constitutional body: minority opinions matter, and they should be visible. The Supreme Court of India publishes dissenting judgments, and those dissents have often later become majority positions or influenced significant doctrinal shifts. Dissenting opinion in a collegiate body is not a sign of institutional dysfunction it is a sign of genuine deliberation. The ECI, by contrast, offers no such visibility. When it grants a clean chit on an MCC violation, it does not as a rule publish elaborate reasoning. Where a Commissioner disagrees, that disagreement even if recorded internally does not enter the public domain. There is no way for the public to know whether a decision was unanimous or split two-to-one. In politically sensitive cases, this matters enormously.

The argument here is not that the ECI should function like a court, with lengthy written opinions. The argument is narrower: that on decisions involving MCC complaints against candidates and political leaders during election season decisions with obvious partisan stakes the existence of internal disagreement and the reasoning behind it should be a matter of public record. Without that, the ECI's decisions are not just unappealable in most practical terms; they are unreviewable, unscrutinisable, and essentially unchallengeable by the public whose democratic rights they directly affect.

It would be too dramatic a claim to say India's elections are failing because the ECI lacks a dissent protocol. That is not the argument here. But the Lavasa episode was a warning that the internal architecture of the Commission is not working as it should that constitutional protections around the ECI are asymmetrically designed, that Article 324's silence on internal procedure is not a harmless gap but an actual institutional vulnerability, and that the question of internal dissent has been treated as somehow too inconvenient to address directly.

A constitutional body entrusted with the integrity of elections in the world's largest democracy should not be able to resolve the most sensitive electoral questions in institutional silence, with no public record of disagreement, no structural protection for the minority voice, and no norm of transparency in collective deliberation. The Chief Election Commissioner holds very significant authority. The two Election Commissioners should function as genuine deliberative checks within the body not as junior members who find it prudent to agree.

The Constitution contemplated a multi-member ECI. It never explained what being multi-member was supposed to mean in practice. That is a problem the legislature, the Court, or at the very least the Commission itself needs to take seriously before the next episode that makes it impossible to ignore.

Author is an Assistant Professor at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Delhi NCR Campus. Views are personal.