Among all states where the SIR was conducted, Gujarat recorded the highest net deletion, with 68,12,711 electors removed.
On January 26, Mir Hajibhai Kasambhai Rathod, a folk musician from Gujarat received the Padma Shri award, India’s fourth-highest civilian award, on the Republic Day. A day later, Rathod’s name in the electoral list drew objections from a local political leader. The leader, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), alleged that Rathod was not a native of the Junagadh village, where he is a voter.
However, Rathod is not the only one being pushed out of electoral rolls abruptly.
Several Indian voters are finding themselves turfed out through the exercise of ‘Special Intensive Revision’ (SIR) of electoral rolls. The SIR, which the Election Commission of India (ECI) said was aimed at updating voter lists across various states, has instead led to a heated debate about how the exercise is actually excluding voters.
Demolishing voters not just homes
In November 2025, the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) along with police launched a mega demolition drive to clear illegal encroachments at Ahmedabad’s Isanpur lake.
According to AMC, of the 96,000 square metres of government land at the lake site, nearly 30% (28,800 square metres) is cited as “encroached” and the November drive launched was to clear 925 illegal residential structures. This is the second mega demolition drive in the city after the local administration cleared alleged encroachments on nearly 1.25 lakh square metres of land around the city’s Chandola lake area in April 2025.
However, along with clearing homes and emptying the Isanpur area of alleged encroachers, the drive also scattered locals living there – and subsequently, their votes too.
Santosh Sinh Rathod, an Ahmedabad-based RTI and electoral reform activist, looks carefully at the timing of this demolition. Rathod, who was actively interacting with the victims of demolition in Isanpur says that while the SIR is being conducted after at least two decades, there are guidelines that must be adhered to.
Rathod, who sought information under the RTI from the election commission about the SIR guidelines of 2002 said that the 2002 revision did not require voters to provide any proof of their presence in earlier lists, including the 1995 SIR. The RTI also revealed that while the current SIR places the responsibility on the voter instead of enumerators and demands proof of existence in the 2002 list, even when no such documentation was required at that time.
“In 2002, the guidelines said that the block-level officer (BLO) would record those who had migrated, he would even look for their new address and even go to the BLO of their new address to confirm their residence. But this time we see that if there is no form submission made to the BLO, you don’t exist as a voter,” Rathod told The Wire.
“If you listen to [Chief Election Commissioner] Gyanesh Kumar’s presser, he hasn’t said anything about the guidelines that need to be followed by BLOs on demolitions. Kumar has not given any guidelines about demolitions. Demolitions are not allowed at the time of SIR, but the ECI did not dispense any such guidelines. Voters have been wiped out. There are more provisions to exclude voters, rather than include voters in the rolls,” he added.
The 2002 guidelines that Rathod has referred to, he said, have revealed that even if the demolitions happen after a court order and need to be undertaken during an SIR exercise, those who vacate the land in question must be rehabilitated by the government and their addresses must be shared with the BLO by the administration.
“The demolition could have been delayed, it was not necessary to be conducted during the SIR. Their names were lost from lists” Rathod said.
Evading ECI guidelines?
Among all regions where the SIR was conducted, Gujarat recorded the highest net deletion, with 68,12,711 electors removed.
“This is such a huge deletion in what is being categorised as absent, dead and shifted. That is almost 11% more than 11.5% of the total voter list” said Pankti Jog, social activist and state coordinator of the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) Gujarat.
Jog shared that several activists from Gujarat were writing to the ECI, demanding a complete list of the 68 lakh people, classified into categories as disqualified, missing, shifted, absent and dead.
We are asking for a disclosure of this calculation. And we are also asking them, whether any procedure was done to verify those marked absent, shifted and dead, during the SIR process, whether they are really not eligible as voters, and how they would take the decision,” Jog told The Wire.
Jog also added that as per ECI, when there is an addition of more than 2% or deletion of more than 2%, then the ECI must be cautious and they should cross verify whether that deletion or addition is genuine or not.
“The biggest gap in this process, in the design of SIR 2026 is that there is no procedure to verify those who weren’t able to fill the enumeration form for whatsoever reason, whether they are eligible voters or not and since it’s a time-bound process, there may be any number of reasons why voters can’t fill their enumeration form. People are not there, their houses are demolished.
“They have disappeared somewhere, the enumeration form is coming on their earlier address. People have shifted from one district to another. There is inter-district migration. There can be any number of reasons. So, the entire process is not catching this, there is no mapping from source to destination,” she explained.
Social activists at district levels also pointed towards the gap in the design itself.
They pointed out that those people marked incorrectly might have to fill in Form 6 again.
“They have to prove themselves that they are alive and existing, and many of them are from marginal communities, and might not have the resources to keep themselves engaged with SIR processes and may finally quit on the burdensome task of trying to get themselves included in the voter roll,” they said.
BJP’s bulk objections
Allegations have emerged of mass submissions of Form 7 applications seeking the deletion of names from electoral rolls from many locations in Gujarat. Mujahid Nafees, General Secretary, PUCL and Convener Minority Coordination Committee, Gujarat, claims that there is a pattern which makes itself visible throughout the exercise.
“After the draft list, I could see that BJP leaders filed objections against Muslim voters in bulk. Though their plan couldn’t succeed because of several organisations spreading awareness about form 7, we still saw areas like Akbarnagar losing out on 1200 voters who had been declared as ‘shifted’. But looking at the way objections filed in bulk by the BJP were accepted, shows that the ECI is hand in glove with pro-government forces,” Nafees told The Wire.
Mir Hajibhai Kasambhai, the Padma Shri awardee singer, was one among the many voters who faced this attempt at deletion. The BJP corporator who raised an objection to his name in the voter list, later withdrew his objection, which then led to the case being closed.
Kasambhai, however, was heartbroken when he came to know about the objection. “I have been lauded by several governments and several times; seeing my name being objected to, was bizarre” he said.
Speaking to The Wire, his family mentioned how his happiness of being awarded was dulled by this objection.
Adreman Alarakhabhai Panja, a councillor in Junagadh’s municipal corporation also faced a similar objection. “I am an elected councillor, yet a BJP corporator tried to get my name deleted. It is all planned,” he said.
Locals in Junagadh also shared with The Wire that they were unable to understand how the ECI accepted objections in bulk.
Manish Doshi, Congress chief spokesperson from Gujarat, highlighted the “blindness” he saw in ECI’s demeanour while accepting bulk objections. “There are rules even for submitting objections, no one can submit more than 50 objections. Yet, we see hundreds of Form 7 being submitted by the name of one person. We have written to the ECI regarding details of this objection submission,” Doshi said.
Doshi also pointed towards a centralised operation of sorts, which if proven would be illegal and against all rules and norms of the ECI. He observed that all submitted objections were typed and signed in a similar fashion, pointing to a highly strategised aim of getting names deleted.
“It is a very well organised, pre-planned conspiracy calculated at deleting names that can alter future voting outcomes. One also needs to look at why the previous chief electoral officer of Gujarat was replaced right after the SIR procedures were completed? Why was Hareet Shukla transferred? There are plenty of proofs and actions pointing towards an unplanned SIR that could fulfil BJP’s own plans,” Doshi claimed.
The Wire on February 3, had done a detailed account from Salabatpura area of Surat where a BJP corporator was found to have been “misusing” Form 7 to declare several hundred Muslim voters as deceased.
When asked for a comment, Gujarat BJP spokesperson Anil Patel did not respond.
(This article has been written by Tarushi Aswani.)
(This article first appeared in The Wire.)
