On 27 October 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) launched a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across nine states and three Union Territories (after a test run in Bihar). By early January 2026, provisional lists revealed an astonishing outcome: nearly 6.5 crore citizens had been removed from the rolls.

India has not witnessed a net decline in registered voters of this magnitude since the introduction of universal adult franchise in 1950 — not during wars, not during famines, not even during the Covid-19 pandemic that claimed millions of lives. The scale of deletion alone rules out benign explanations.

The question before the republic is no longer administrative but existential: if the State can erase 6.5 crore citizens without census data, without parliamentary debate, without transparent criteria and without meaningful due process, does universal adult franchise exist as a right — or merely as a constitutional ornament?

A net decline of such magnitude can be explained by only three phenomena: mass death, mass emigration or mass disenfranchisement.

India has experienced none of these. Even the most expansive estimates of excess Covid-19 deaths — figures the state has resisted acknowledging — fall far short. More tellingly, the pandemic’s peak lies years behind us. If mortality were the cause, deletions would have peaked then, not now.

Internal migration offers no escape from this arithmetic. Migrants do not lose citizenship by moving; they merely change location. Migration complicates voter registration, but it cannot shrink the electorate by tens of millions unless the system is designed to exclude itinerants rather than accommodate them.

Only one explanation remains: this is political engineering of the electorate. The central question is therefore not how the Election Commission executed the deletions, but who decided that these 6.5 crore people no longer count as voters — and by what authority.

Electoral roll revision is a routine democratic exercise. It adds new voters, removes the deceased based on records and corrects errors. It is incremental, cautious and overwhelmingly additive. Democracies assume that electorates grow.

The SIR departs radically from this logic. It is subtractive. Most critically, it reverses the constitutional burden of proof. Instead of the State establishing grounds for deletion, citizens are required to prove their continued eligibility.

This inversion is not procedural trivia — it is constitutional sabotage. Universal adult franchise rests on the presumption of inclusion. The State must prove death, duplication or loss of........

© National Herald