The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was supposed to clean up the voters' lists. Instead, mounting evidence suggests that the exercise has itself become deeply compromised. Calling it merely an administrative error would be an injustice to the millions whose right to vote has been placed in jeopardy.
More than 13 crore names were struck off the draft rolls in 30 states and union territories. The Election Commission may have explanations for every deletion, but the sheer scale demands something more than explanations. It demands accountability.
Questions have also been raised about elections held after the SIR exercise, particularly in West Bengal. The credibility of an election depends on the confidence that those entitled to vote were not arbitrarily removed.
Questions Over Form 6 Changes
The most disturbing evidence concerns Form 6, through which new voters register. The ECINET portal inserted an additional declaration, requiring applicants to provide information about themselves or their parents and grandparents in earlier voters’ rolls.
Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, reportedly, objected on record to the alteration. They questioned its legal basis and the manner in which it had been introduced. Yet, the change remained in use until the controversy became public.
Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi has raised questions that the Commission cannot simply brush aside. Who in the ECI ordered TCS to make the alteration? Who at TCS approved it? These are not questions about political ideology; they are questions about the chain of accountability in an institution entrusted with protecting the citizen's most basic democratic right.
The controversy over Form 7 in Karnataka raises another serious concern. Allegations were made that bulk and fraudulent applications were filed to delete genuine voters. If the allegations are established, they would reveal how easily an electoral roll revision can be manipulated unless the safeguards are robust and independently enforced.
EC Orders Special Enrolment Drive
The Commission's own subsequent actions are revealing. It has ordered a special drive in 20 states and union territories to enrol eligible voters who were left out.
If the original exercise was as reliable as claimed, why was a rescue operation necessary? The deepest irony is that those most vulnerable to bureaucratic exclusion are the very people who sustain India's democracy: the poor, migrants, workers, and citizens who may not possess a neat file of documents proving where their parents or grandparents lived decades ago.
The rich can hire lawyers and intermediaries. The poor often have only their vote. The ECI was created to protect that vote. It cannot afford to become an institution that citizens suspect of working in the interests of any political establishment.
The questions surrounding SIR are now too serious to be dismissed as partisan allegations. The Commission owes the country transparent answers, and the voters deserve nothing less. Otherwise, it should quit.
