WHEN A CLEAN-UP BECOMES A MESS

A year ago, the idea of a massive nationwide exercise to visit every single household to verify, add, or delete voters was not on anyone’s radar. After all, the Narendra Modi government did not even conduct the mandatory decadal census. Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar took charge in February 2025 and, for three months, did not utter the term ‘special intensive revision’ (SIR). Suddenly, one day in June, the CEC announced a nationwide SIR beginning with Bihar. Why so suddenly and so hastily?

- PRAVEEN CHAKRAVARTY

It all started after the 2024 Maharashtra election, when the Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and I demonstrated comprehensively how the election was stolen using fake voters. More voters were added in five months in Maharashtra than in the entire previous five-year period. And all these new voters seem to have magically voted only for the BJP alliance. This was proved with data and groundwork.

Further, Rahul Gandhi exposed similar voter-list frauds in other states. The Election Commission steadfastly refused to accept our demand for providing voter lists of all states in a machine-readable form for further analysis. Public belief about faulty voter lists was rising and the EC’s credibility was rapidly falling. Clearly something was amiss, and hence the need to announce an SIR to clean the lists and wash past sins.

The last nationwide SIR took three full years, starting in 2002 and ending in January 2005. There were 700,000 polling stations and 65 crore voters then. India today has more than 100 crore voters and 12 lakh polling stations—a huge increase from 2005. Yet, CEC Gyanesh Kumar now wants to rush and finish the SIR process in a third of the time.