A year ago, the idea of a massive nationwide exercise to visit every single household to verify, add, or delete voters was not on anyone’s radar. After all, the Narendra Modi government did not even conduct the mandatory decadal census.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar took charge in February 2025 and, for three months, did not utter the term ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR). Suddenly, one day in June, the CEC announced a nationwide SIR beginning with Bihar. Why so suddenly and so hastily?
It all started after the 2024 Maharashtra election, when the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and I demonstrated comprehensively how the election was stolen using fake voters. More voters were added in five months in Maharashtra than in the entire previous five-year period. And all these new voters seem to have magically voted only for the BJP alliance. This was proved with data and groundwork.
Further, Rahul Gandhi exposed similar voter-list frauds in other states. The Election Commission steadfastly refused to accept our demand for providing voter lists of all states in a machine-readable form for further analysis.
Public belief about faulty voter lists was rising and the EC’s credibility was rapidly falling. Clearly something was amiss, and hence the need to announce an SIR to clean the lists and wash past sins.
The last nationwide SIR took three full years, starting in 2002 and ending in January 2005. There were 700,000 polling stations and 65 crore voters then. India today has more than 100 crore voters and 12 lakh polling stations—a huge increase from 2005. Yet, CEC Gyanesh Kumar now wants to rush and finish the SIR process in a third of the time.
In SIR Phase 2, the EC wants 5.3 lakh booth-level officers (BLO) across nine states and three Union territories to visit crores of homes and enumerate, verify, add, or delete 51 core voters in just a month! These BLOs have to distribute voter forms, help the vast majority of voters fill it, manually verify each voter’s existence in the 2003 electoral rolls, collect the appropriate documentation for proof of age, citizenship, and residence, and then submit these forms.
Now, is there any surprise that five BLOs have lost their lives tragically due to stress and work pressure of SIR, including by suicide? The EC is culpable for these horrendous and utterly avoidable deaths of five Indians.
To be crystal clear, India’s voter lists are riddled with ghosts, fakes, and duplicates, and need to be cleaned and purified. Voter lists are the aadhaar or foundation of any democracy. India’s democracy today stands on a shaky foundation of flawed voter lists.
So, any exercise to clean the lists is welcome and much-needed. It is unwise to oppose list cleaning or even the idea of SIR.
But Gyanesh Kumar’s SIR is a cure worse than the disease. There were absolutely no discussions, deliberation, consultation with political parties and the public before the launch of a nationwide SIR. This is in direct contrast to the SIR exercise in 2002, when the EC held joint discussions with all parties and gave enough notice before launching the SIR.
This rush to launch SIR has left all political parties, BLOs, and voters unprepared. Consequently, there is utter chaos among voters, extremely stressed EC workers, and agitated political parties.
The Supreme Court now must stop this chaotic and messy SIR exercise and first ask the EC to prepare a comprehensive process document for voter list cleaning in consultation with all political parties.
In the interim, the EC can use Aadhaar as a tool to eliminate duplicates and fake voters. It is true that Aadhaar does not imply citizenship and only Indian citizens must be allowed to vote. Every Aadhaar holder need not be a voter, but every voter must have an Aadhaar.
So, even without an elaborate SIR, Aadhaar can be used to eliminate a vast chunk of the current problem by asking every voter to link their Aadhaar with their voter ID. This is a simple and established process.
Yes, there is a Supreme Court ruling that prohibits the EC from making Aadhaar mandatory for voters. But guess what? The EC already has made Aadhaar mandatory for revision of voter details.
If one wants to change their address or any other information in their voter ID, then a Form 8 needs to be submitted with the desired change which will be verified using the person’s Aadhaar details and a one-time password sent to the Aadhaar-linked mobile number. So, if a person has not linked their voter ID with Aadhaar, they cannot change any details.
In other words, the EC has already surreptitiously made Aadhaar mandatory for voter ID modification. Then why not link all voter IDs to Aadhaar and use it to remove fake and duplicate ones? Regardless of their views in the past, nearly all political parties now support using Aadhaar to clean voter lists.
The current SIR process is an effort to cover past mistakes in the voter list than to clean. Hence the haste and ensuing chaos resulting in tragic deaths of innocent people, erosion of public trust in the EC, and utter lack of faith in elections by opposition parties. It runs the risk of collapsing the very edifice of India’s democracy. The Supreme Court must step in and ask Gyanesh Kumar: why this ‘kola-hurry da’?
Praveen Chakravarty | Chairman, All India Professionals’ Congress and AICC Data Analytics Department
(Views are personal)
