RUCKUS OVER THE ROLLS

The ECI's special intensive revision (SIR) and draft voter lists have led to charges that millions in Bihar might be disenfranchised. It's still unclear how it will pan out

- KAUSHIK DEKA and AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

It is a sultry August morning in Patna, and the Sadar block office wears the quiet, composed air of a still life portrait.

Three officers sit at their desks, a laptop loaded with draft electoral rolls before them, a wall pasted with printed lists...and zero visitors. Not a single elector has walked in to check their status or file a complaint. “We'll wait,” mutters Dharmendra Kumar, one of the officials, resigned to the tedium. Five days later, his station finally sees movement. Two men walk in, saying their names are missing from the draft list. The lethargy bears no hint of the storm brewing in Bihar’s polity: the state’s electoral rolls have shed 6.56 million names, a staggering 8.3 per cent reduction that has shrunk the electorate from 78.9 million voters in January 2025 to 72.4 million in seven months.

This massive pruning emerged from the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) special intensive revision (SIR), a month-long exercise that deployed some 84,000 booth-level officers across 90,712 polling stations, backed by 160,000 booth-level agents from 12 political parties, 3,000-odd electoral registration officers (EROs) and thousands of volunteers.

The deletions appear to follow an administrative method and logic. Of the 6.56 million names, 2.23 million are classified as deceased, 3.63 million as having permanently migrated or absent/ untraceable, and 700,000 as duplicate entries across multiple locations. Only 120,000 names, a mere 1.8 per cent of the total, are stated to have been deleted for not submitting enumeration forms by the July 25 deadline. These individuals have been conferred the right to apply for reinstatement with proper documentation, potentially making their exclusion temporary. This benign picture is in stark contrast to the Opposition’s narrative of mass disenfran- chisement, produced by design via a hectic but chaotic bureaucratic quickie.