Summary: Shekhar Gupta lists an Election Commission “more broken than ever” among his twelve “challenges” facing Narendra Modi in his 26th year in public office. The record says otherwise. The full Commission recorded the SIR order and schedules as unanimous on 26 September, and the Supreme Court upheld the SIR exercise on 27 May 2026. Gupta also displays his usual selective amnesia: the UPA making Naveen Chawla CEC in 2009 after the outgoing CEC, N. Gopalaswami, sought his removal for partisanship; ex-CEC M.S. Gill turning up as a Congress Rajya Sabha MP in 2004 and a UPA minister in 2008; governments alone picking Election Commissioners until the 2023 Act gave the Opposition a seat on the panel; Bihar’s booth capturing and the rigged 1987 Kashmir election.
Why it matters: Shekhar Gupta’s framing of the Election Commission collapses when checked against the record, a reminder that “mainstream” commentary on Bharat’s institutions needs fact-checking as much as any government claim. Gupta’s long proximity to Lutyens’ Delhi, and his clout as a power broker of the news business, deserve wider notice. Readers who know which circles his prose serves will find his columns easier to decode.
“A Battalion of Innuendoes Shekhar Gupta Finds Twelve Sorrows and Zero Evidence” — MyIndMakers, 4 Nov 2026
Every season has its rituals. The monsoon brings frogs. Diwali brings sweets. And whenever his masters are in trouble, Shekhar Gupta follows the editorial line of Lutyens’ Delhi and brings a list. Here:
Modi at 25 is staring at a cascade of crises. A perfect storm is building: https://theprint.in/national-interest/narendra-modi-25-years-challenges/3067173/
Shekhar Gupta, at 69 and in bed with crookedness, discovers twelve “battalions of sorrows” besieging Narendra Modi in his 26th year in public office, armed with a line from Shakespeare and a 1995 paper by C.K. Prahalad, lest anyone mistake a column for drawing-room gossip. Prahalad taught that weak signals add up to big change. Gupta has proved a corollary: twelve crooked sorrows add up to one crooked column…
Read the full article at MyIndMakers →
