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India is presently living through a mystery that could well have flummoxed Sherlock Holmes and taxed Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells inordinately. It’s an enigma that the country has been living with since June 2025, when the Election Commission of India (ECI), under its chief servitor to power, Gyanesh Kumar, announced that his organisation is undertaking a Special Intensive Revision (SIR). 

It was to be, the ECI maintained, a “neutral clean-up”, one in which “no names will be deleted” and “names will not be included”. It was also claimed at that juncture that all genuine electors “particularly old, sick, persons with disabilities, poor and other vulnerable groups” will not be harassed.

Today, eight months later, these words come back to us laden with irony.  The intervening period saw two major elections: one for the state assembly of Bihar, the other for the richest corporation in the country, the Bombay Municipal Corporation. Both verdicts favoured the ruling party but that of course should not surprise us. The next few months will witness some of the most portentous elections in the country because all the major states now going to the polls, except one (Assam), are currently ruled by the opposition whether it is Bengal, Kerala, or Tamil Nadu. 

At a recent public hearing held in Delhi, attended by 200 people and presided over by two former Supreme Court judges, Justice Madan Lokur and Justice A.K. Patnaik, besides noted academics – economist Jean Dreze and political scientist Nivedita Menon – (full disclosure: I was also a jury member), testimonies of people from ten states across the country revealed the bogus nature of the claims made about SIR when it was first introduced. 

What we heard from those who testified was that the SIR “clean up” was not “neutral”; the names of eligible voters were deleted and the old, sick and vulnerable were harassed. So damning was the evidence that the jury members were forced to observe that the “possibility of mass disenfranchisement is real and ominous” and that in order to fulfil the basic requirement of a credible SIR process, the exercise must be stopped until it is reconsidered and reworked.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

Testimonies from the hearing proved how hollow were the claims of the ECI. First, the SIR process was clearly not “neutral”. The case of Ahmedabad’s Akbar Nagar, a basti in Vidhan Sabha No 50, Booth Number 173, is a case in point.  People who had lived here for 35 years had their homes demolished about a year ago and the high court had ruled that they be rehabilitated in different places. Once the SIR preparations began some 600 people of the 1206 original voters of Akbar Nagar – all Muslims – filled forms for securing their names in the electoral rolls but these forms were not accepted. 

The sitting BJP MLA had argued that since their homes were demolished, it was an indication that they were illegals and therefore their names must not be included. Sure enough, the draft rolls when they came out did not have the names of the 1206 original residents of Akbar Nagar. In effect, not only were their habitation demolished, their identities as citizens also disappeared.   

If the SIR cleanup was not neutral, it is also true that it has led to the deletion of the names of bonafide electors.  We heard Dharamchand, from Kotra district, Rajasthan, which adjoins Gujarat. He reported that thousands from his area cross the border into Gujarat to earn a livelihood as sharecroppers every year. The SIR process took place when such migration was in full swing, since it was the peak agricultural season. When these people sought to return home to ensure that their names were included in the electoral rolls, the landlords who had hired them refused to allow them to go back. “From our block, in total, more than 23,000 voters had had their names excluded from the draft rolls; the reason given for these absences was that they had shifted.........

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