Every revision of “Where things stand”

The Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, is the Election Commission’s rebuilding of India’s electoral rolls, the lists of people registered to vote in each constituency. Booth officers were to hand every voter on the roll a pre-filled enumeration form to fill in and return, and voters who could not be linked to the roll of the last intensive revision could be asked for documents. It began in Bihar in June 2025, and by September 2026 it had cut 13.37 crore names from draft rolls, the lists published for claims and objections before the final roll, in 30 states and union territories: 14.1% of the rolls as they stood before.

Most of those names were not people the Commission found to be dead or listed twice. Of nearly 13.3 crore names deleted, around 9.5 crore, over 71%, were marked ‘absent, shifted, and others’, around 2.7 crore were deaths, and about 1.01 crore were flagged as multiple entries. Many of the first group could still come back, on the form a new voter fills.

India has had to make this list before, and its first one shows how much a list can leave out. Sukumar Sen, the first chief election commissioner, had to register an electorate most of whom could not read or write: universal adult suffrage made 173 million people over 21 eligible, and 85% of them could not read or write. The roll for the general elections of 1951-52 held 17,32,13,635 voters outside Jammu and Kashmir. Nearly 28 lakh women had their entries deleted because they would not give their own names, after the Commission directed that ‘any woman who refused to give her proper name should not be registered as a voter’. Ornit Shani, who teaches Asian studies at the University of Haifa, found that, with citizenship itself still undecided, ‘the most concrete way of being an Indian was to be on the electoral roll’.

After that first election the Commission ordered intensive revisions, which rebuild the roll from a house-to-house count. Bihar’s last was in 2003; in between, summary revisions publish the existing roll as a draft for claims and objections. Those rolls had real faults: a Janaagraha survey before Delhi’s 2013 election found close to 20% of the city’s names could have serious errors. Canada and Australia keep theirs from records the state already holds, and Australia’s roll covers 97.6% of eligible voters.

Bihar went first. The Commission’s order of 24 June 2025 sent booth-level officers, the local officials who keep the roll of a polling station, to every household with a form for each voter, and a voter whose form was not in by 25 July would not be on the draft roll. A voter on the 2003 roll needed only an extract of it, which officers were to treat as ‘probative evidence of eligibility, including presumption of citizenship’ unless other information came to them.

Nearly 65 lakh of Bihar’s 7.89 crore electors were left off the draft roll of 1 August 2025, and the final roll of 30 September held 7.42 crore. More women than men were removed: Scroll found the electorate had 914 women for every thousand men in January 2025 and 894 afterwards, below the 2011 census ratio of 918, and that nearly 59% of the deleted voters were women. Newslaundry found 11.6 lakh women struck off as dead, though men are nearly 60% of the deaths Bihar records. The Commission told the Supreme Court that women had moved away on marriage; The Hindu said its data showed more men migrating for work than women for marriage.

Analyses of whether the deletions changed Bihar’s election disagree. Scroll found nothing significant in the Commission’s poll data: the National Democratic Alliance won exactly 50% of the close contests. The Wire counted 11 seats where the voters removed before the election outnumbered the winner’s margin.

For voters who could not be linked to the old roll, the revision became a test of papers. The list of acceptable documents ran from a birth certificate to a forest rights certificate, and on 8 September 2025 the Supreme Court added Aadhaar as the twelfth, as proof of identity though not of citizenship. Many voters may never have been issued a birth certificate: the Registrar General estimates that only 56.0% of births in Bihar were registered in 2011, and 55.2% in 2016. Writing in The Wire for the Congress, Syed Khalid Saifullah called it unjust to ask for ‘a document that was never issued to them’.

Critics said this moved a test of citizenship onto voters, and India had seen such tests before. Rangarajan R., a former civil servant, wrote that ‘The ECI is not the authority under law to establish the citizenship of any person’. In 1995 the Supreme Court quashed a drive in which the Bombay police had written to 1.67 lakh people asking for documents, and ruled that a name already on the roll carries weight. In Assam, a check of documents for the National Register of Citizens left 19,06,657 people out of it in 2019.

On 27 May 2026 the Supreme Court upheld the Bihar revision. It held that the Commission may enquire into citizenship to decide who goes on the roll, but that only the authority under the Citizenship Act can decide whether a person is a citizen, and that the Commission’s view ‘cannot assume finality on the question of citizenship’. It accepted the Commission’s reasons, that ‘rapid urbanisation and migration’ since 2003 had left ‘repeated, multiple and defective entries’ on the roll. V. Venkatesan of the Supreme Court Observer argued that it distinguished the 1995 ruling although that case, in his reading, concerned the same kind of exercise.

A second round began in nine states and three union territories in November 2025, and a third in 2026. In the second round 6.56 crore electors, nearly 13%, were cut from draft rolls, against 8.3% in Bihar. The third round cut deeper in places: Delhi’s draft roll left out 32.80% of its electors, Telangana’s 21.70% and Maharashtra’s 21.10%.

In most of the states it analysed, The Hindu found, the number of women for every thousand men fell between the 2024 Lok Sabha rolls and the final rolls; Tamil Nadu was the only major state where it rose. In Uttar Pradesh 1.55 crore women and 1.34 crore men were cut from the draft roll. West Bengal’s final roll of February 2026 held 6.44 crore names, with another 60.06 lakh doubtful and pending cases marked ‘Under Adjudication’, to be added only if judicial officers approved them.

Some names were pushed off by other voters. Form 7 lets a voter object to a name on the roll, and in Karnataka’s Babaleshwar constituency 1,363 of the 1,373 Form 7 applications received on 22 September came from just 10 persons, largely against Muslim voters. Karnataka’s chief electoral officer said legal action would be started against anyone found filing them in bulk. In Surat, Muslim voters told The Wire that a BJP corporator had declared them dead on Form 7s; he denied it. In Hyderabad, Muslim voters told The News Minute that a BJP booth agent who had known them since childhood filed Form 7s against them; he said he had been given the forms at the party office.

Analyses and reporting describe the revision falling harder on some groups, though they measure different things. In Bihar, The Wire found voters with Muslim-sounding names were 24.7% of those flagged but 32.1% of those finally removed. A jury convened by the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and two other groups found the revision fell hardest on migrants, Muslims, tribal people and women. In Bengal, Al Jazeera met people struck off although their documents were in order.

The work fell on booth-level officers, among them schoolteachers, who keep the roll of polling stations of no more than 1,500 voters. In August 2025 the Commission doubled their yearly pay from ₹6,000 to ₹12,000, and approved a special incentive of ₹6,000 for the revision. In Bihar, Newslaundry found no written standard for what proved a voter dead, moved or absent: ‘I live in the village, I know who has died, who has moved’, one officer said. The Reporters’ Collective reported that the Commission did not use its software for finding duplicate names there.

Some officers died during the work, and unions and political parties blamed it. Mukesh Jangid, a teacher and booth-level officer in Jaipur, died by suicide in November 2025 after leaving a note that blamed the SIR work and his supervisor’s threats of suspension. In Kerala, booth-level officers struck for a day after the death of Aneesh George; the district collector said no link to the revision had been shown.

Getting back on has been slower than coming off. In West Bengal 38,20,683 appeals reached the appellate tribunals, and 1,02,231 had been decided when the Commission reported to the Supreme Court in September 2026. The Wire found a Form 7 request to delete a name was 2.19 times as likely as a Form 6 application to add one to reach a completed outcome. In Rejinagar, which goes to a bye-election on 6 October, Scroll found four appeals decided in six months, all in favour of inclusion.

The Commission points to its safeguards: in Bihar, it said, no name could be deleted from the draft roll without notice and a speaking order, a decision giving reasons, with appeals to the District Magistrate and then the Chief Electoral Officer. Its letter of 14 May 2026 told officers to hold an inquiry and give a fair and reasonable opportunity before deleting any entry.

On 2 October The Hindu reported that the Commission had told chief electoral officers to compare the rolls before and after the revision and re-enrol eligible people left out within about a month; S.Y. Quraishi said Form 6 is only for new voters. The paper’s editorial argued that deleting first and verifying later obstructs universal adult franchise. On 26 September 2026 it said the revision was complete in 20 states and union territories and that anyone left out could still apply; a special drive to enrol them on Form 6 followed.

The revision has also divided the Commission. Two of its three members, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, recorded at least 14 objections in 10 months, The Indian Express reported, among them a changed form for new voters and appeals in West Bengal. They objected on file to a declaration added to Form 6 asking whether the applicant’s, a parent’s or a grandparent’s name was on the roll of the last intensive revision, and Sandhu called the change ‘unauthorised/ illegal’. Each also wrote to the Cabinet Secretary that central control of who may use the Commission’s software was curbing the powers the law gives roll officers.

In Goa, the chief electoral officer wrote to Delhi again and again asking that his officers be allowed to restore voters they had cleared, and those voters stayed off the roll. Ritika Chopra, who reported the story, said in a video for the paper that the three commissioners are meant to decide together, by consensus or by majority. The Commission replied that singling out such notes gave ‘only one part of the picture’, and that differing views are part of deliberation. Members have differed before, among them T N Seshan’s colleagues and Ashok Lavasa, and when they do the majority decides.

The former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa asked who controls the roll and whether the Commission alone could change the form; on Newslaundry’s NL Hafta he argued it could not, even with all three members agreed, without the government’s approval. The researcher Srinivas Kodali asked in Newslaundry whether the Commission’s software still leaves the last word on each roll with its registration officer, as the law does. Some of the lawyers who argued against the revision told Newslaundry that the report gives them no fresh ground in court, though they question the Commission’s power to change Form 6.

The Commission had already faced a charge of vote theft. In August 2025 Rahul Gandhi said the Congress had ‘criminal evidence’ of fraud in the Mahadevapura segment of Bangalore Central, and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar told him to file a signed affidavit or apologise. A former chief election commissioner, S Y Quraishi, said the Commission should have ordered a probe instead, because ‘Not only do we have to be fair, we have to appear to be fair.’ Another, O P Rawat, called the Commission impartial.

The argument has moved to the street and the opinion pages. By 3 October police in Delhi had detained protesters calling for the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation, among them Yogendra Yadav, and students in Bengaluru wanted him arrested. Writing in the Hindustan Times, Roshan Kishore compared the revision with demonetisation: a promised purge that became a procedural tangle. Muqtedar Khan argued in Frontline that the dispute is part of a wider loss of public trust in the government, and Debasish Roy Chowdhury, in the same magazine, that the opposition should boycott elections it calls rigged.

The record does not yet show how many of the names cut from draft rolls will be back on the final rolls, or how many of those marked dead were alive. Nor does it show how many people the Commission has referred to the authorities under the Citizenship Act, as the Supreme Court required.॥