The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday announced the second phase of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, a process meant to verify and update voter lists by adding new voters and deleting ineligible ones.
The initial phase will leave out states like Maharashtra, where local body elections are to be held by January 31, 2026, as per Supreme Court directives, as well as the snow-bound states/UTs of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Ladakh. The last intensive revision of electoral rolls in India was undertaken two decades ago.
The first phase of SIR was completed in Bihar with zero appeals, said Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar while making the announcement.
The ongoing SIR exercise is the ninth since Independence, with the last one conducted 21 years ago, during 2002–04.
While the ECI maintains that SIR is a routine, technical exercise to ensure clean electoral rolls ahead of major elections, opposition parties across several states are questioning its timing, intent, and execution.
Their central charge: that SIR is being used by the BJP-led Centre to “manipulate” voter lists and selectively remove names of voters from communities seen as unfavourable to the ruling party.
‘A conspiracy to steal votes’: Opposition
The first major flashpoint over SIR emerged in Bihar, where the exercise led to the deletion of nearly 4 lakh names from the draft rolls earlier this year. Congress and the larger INDIA bloc allies seized on the issue, calling it an “electoral fraud in the making”.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi made SIR the centrepiece of his Voter Adhikar Yatra across Bihar, alleging that the Election Commission was acting under government pressure. “This is a conspiracy to strike opposition voters off electoral rolls,” Congress leaders claimed, tying it to their larger accusation that “BJP victories since 2014 were facilitated by vote fraud.”
While the final rolls were published in September without major controversy, the political narrative had already taken root. The Congress found in SIR a fresh rallying cause — and a chance to sharpen its anti-BJP positioning in the Hindi heartland.
Stalin vs BJP in Tamil Nadu
In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister M K Stalin has gone further — calling SIR a “vote theft scheme” designed to favour the BJP and its ally AIADMK.
“Why does #SIR support vote theft to steal people’s votes for the BJP’s election victories?” Stalin asked in a recent post on X, accusing the Centre of using “language imposition, corruption washing, and voter manipulation” to consolidate power.
He followed it up with a strongly worded letter to DMK cadres, warning that SIR was being “used to remove the names of voters from marginalised sections — minorities, Scheduled Castes, women, and the poor — from the rolls.”
“BJP and its ally AIADMK believe that if the names of these voters are deleted through SIR, they can secure victory without facing the people. But this calculation will fail in Tamil Nadu,” Stalin said.
The DMK, he added, would challenge the process both “legally and through people’s protest.” Stalin has also directed party workers to closely monitor every step of the revision, calling it the DMK’s “duty to safeguard citizens’ democratic right to vote.”
Trinamool warns of voter roll manipulation in Bengal
In West Bengal, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) has accused the BJP of using SIR to “manipulate voter lists under the pretext of identifying illegal infiltrators.”
Trinamool spokesperson Kunal Ghosh said: “BJP has neither organisation nor acceptability in Bengal, so now it is trying to manipulate the voter list with the help of EC.” He warned that any deletion of genuine voters “to aid BJP’s agenda will be met with the protest it deserves.”
The BJP, on the other hand, has framed SIR as an exercise to identify “foreign infiltrators” — a claim Trinamool says is “an excuse to target Muslim voters and create division.”
Another TMC leader, criticised the EC’s proposed timeline, calling it a “rush job” that could compromise the accuracy of the revision. “If Bengal polls are due early next year, there’s not enough time for claims and objections,” he sa
