As the Election Commission rolls out its nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the political temperature is boiling over. The exercise—aimed at removing deceased voters, duplicate entries, and illegal migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh—has become the latest punching bag for the Congress and its allies.
But the irony here is rich. For years, these same Opposition parties have thundered in Parliament and at press conferences about the need to protect the sanctity of the electoral process. They’ve accused the Commission of being toothless, complacent, even complicit in allowing flawed voter lists to persist. And now, when the Commission finally takes on the mammoth task of cleaning house, they cry conspiracy.
What exactly are they afraid of?
The SIR is no ordinary paperwork drill. Voter lists in many states are riddled with “ghost voters”—the dead, the relocated, and, in some regions, the undocumented foreign national. These aren’t harmless clerical errors. They are an invitation to organised electoral fraud. In high-stakes constituencies, a few thousand phantom votes can flip the result.
The process to prevent this is straightforward in theory: when a person dies, the family must obtain a death certificate from the local civic body. That civic body is supposed to forward the information to the Election Office for immediate deletion from the rolls. But in practice, this chain of communication is broken—sometimes by negligence, often by design. And the design is bipartisan. Across the political spectrum, parties have shown no urgency to plug this leak because a bloated voter list offers potential “assets” to be exploited on polling day.
Yet, when the Commission moves to rectify the problem, it is the Opposition—especially the Congress—that shouts the loudest. This, from a party that ruled India for nearly six decades and presided over precisely the flawed systems it now claims to despise.
In some states, the problem has been nurtured for decades. Take Tamil Nadu under the DMK or West Bengal under the Left, and now the Trinamool Congress, where voter list anomalies are not an occasional blip but a recurring feature of the political landscape. In West Bengal, the problem is inseparable from the state’s demographic transformation since the 1971 Bangladesh war, which triggered a massive influx of refugees into Assam, West Bengal, and Tripura. Many of these migrants eventually found their way onto the electoral rolls. Some through legal channels, others through politically facilitated shortcuts.
It is no secret that the Left Front, which ruled Bengal for 34 uninterrupted years, turned this influx into a dependable vote bank. The demographic shift altered the political arithmetic permanently. Assam’s chronic political turbulence over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) stems from the same history.
Today, the problem has new dimensions. In the Northeast, the unrest in Myanmar has pushed fresh waves of migrants into Mizoram and Manipur. These developments carry obvious electoral implications in border states. And yet, instead of addressing the challenge, the Opposition pretends it doesn’t exist—because acknowledging it would mean admitting that the Commission’s voter list clean-up is not only justified, but overdue.
And then there’s the Opposition’s shifting scapegoat strategy. Not long ago, it was the “faulty” EVMs—machines they denounced as the root of all electoral evil. But the theory collapsed the moment they won Karnataka, Telangana, and Himachal Pradesh on those very machines. Somehow, EVMs are only “tampered” when they lose. Now, with the EVM bogey dead, the blame game has shifted to the voter list.
It’s a transparent pattern: when the scoreboard isn’t in their favour, it must be the umpire’s fault. When they win, the system is flawless. This cynical selectivity insults the intelligence of voters.
If the Opposition genuinely suspects that the SIR is being weaponised to delete legitimate voters, they should insist on full transparency and independent scrutiny of the process. That is a democratic demand worth making. But rejecting the very idea of a voter list clean-up? That smacks less of principle and more of panic.
For the Election Commission, this is a make-or-break moment. Its credibility rests not on whether it pleases one party or another, but on whether it can conduct the SIR in a manner that is fair, transparent, and beyond reproach. Regular public disclosures of the names deleted and the grounds for deletion would go a long way toward dispelling suspicion.
Technology can—and must—be leveraged. Linking voter IDs to Aadhaar, integrating with real-time death registries, and verifying addresses through secure digital channels are all tools available today. But even the most sophisticated system will fail if state governments withhold cooperation or play political games with the data.
At its core, this debate is about something fundamental: one person, one vote. A voter list clogged with the names of the dead, the duplicated, and the undocumented is an open invitation to vote chori in the truest sense. Allowing that to persist undermines the very foundation of Indian democracy.
The recent embarrassment of RJD leader and former Bihar Chief Minister Tejashwi Yadav illustrates the point. His voter ID, when checked, was found to be a duplicate rather than the original, forcing him to face the Election Commission’s music.
So too with the chronic liar and Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi. He now claims there are bogus voters in a traditional BJP stronghold in Karnataka—a constituency the party has won for the last three or four terms. Since Congress failed to make inroads there, he suspects foul play in the voters’ list. But after the Maharashtra elections, his similar allegations collapsed when it turned out that the Opposition parties had benefited in the very areas where they complained of inflated voter rolls.
The Opposition’s role should be to safeguard the fairness of the process, not sabotage it. The ruling party’s role should be to prove it is not using the process to tilt the scales. Both sides must recognise that a clean, accurate electoral roll is not a partisan prize—it is a non-negotiable democratic necessity.
For all the political theatrics about the sanctity of the vote, there is one truth neither side can wish away: the easiest election to rig is the one fought on a dirty voter list. If the SIR succeeds, India wins. If it fails, democracy loses—no matter who sits in the chief minister’s chair.
