Much like the infamous National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in Assam that has not just rendered a staggering 19, 00, 000 “potentially excluded” from citizenship but worse, kept in limbo resolution of their grievance by an absence of adjudication for seven years (August 31, 2019), the utterly discredited Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was launched on the back of the political bogey of “illegal immigrants!”
Twelve years ago it was the challenger to the post of Prime Minister who hysterically raised this bogey in the imminent general elections (2014) and now, in the past two years or so it is him again and his grizzly lieutenant, the country’s home minister who warningly raised the bogey even as their regime drove the country’s Election Commission (a hitherto independent and constitutional body) to conduct a hastily constructed, even unlawful and unconstitutional Special Intensive Revision of India’s Electoral Rolls. Beginning with Bihar in June 2025 and thereafter now completed in 20 states while 16 others reel under its process, the exercise has cost the country dear. Not only do we know what the democratic basis for conducting this process has been (transparency activists have revealed no due process in the decisions taken) but cost estimates are a staggering Rs. 1500-3,000 crores of the Indian tax payer’s money. Worse school functioning, teaching in classrooms and even examinations have been de-railed as teachers have been drawn into an exercise they are ill-trained for.
There is worse. Latest news reveals, and we need to thank the local newspapers in Karnataka (Prajawani among others) as also the Hindustan Times for revealing that the “bogey” used by the two most powerful Indians to justify this exercise has been busted.
Sabrangindia reported on October 28, yesterday, how this baseless propaganda has been exposed as a rank falsehood post SIR in Karnataka and elsewhere. BJP and the Sangh Parivar leaders in Karnataka had claimed that the state, particularly Bengaluru, had 10-25 lakh Bangladeshi infiltrators[1] and that SIR was necessary to identify them; on October 27, the day the final SIR list was released, the CEO, Karnataka (CEO) Anbu Kumar, responding orally to a question, categorically stated that the number of foreign nationals detected was fewer than one thousand. According to the front-page report in Prajavani, a total of 771 foreign nationals were identified in Karnataka, of whom 685 were Nepalis! In Bengaluru North district alone, 580 foreign nationals were identified, of whom 542 were Nepalis. Apart from Nepalis, the other foreign nationals detected were primarily citizens of the United States, Canada, Australia and other Western countries. The argument meant to foster hysteria and hatred stands busted. Read the final categorisation here.[2]
Besides, according to documents obtained from informed sources, only one Bangladeshi national and one Pakistani national were detected, both in Uttara Kannada district. This makes two things abundantly clear. First, the malicious propaganda of the Sangh Parivar was false. Second the motive behind the SIR was not “national security” and identification of “illegal immigrants” but disenfranchising millions of Indians!
Significantly, there are two more important reasons for arriving at this conclusion. In its judgment on SIR delivered on May 27, the Supreme Court directed states where the SIR process had been completed to submit lists of suspected foreign nationals identified during the exercise to the “Competent Authority” under the Ministry of Home Affairs within four weeks. Not merely four weeks, but five months have now passed since that judgment. Even before the Supreme Court delivered its judgment, SIR had already been completed in 13 states. The same transparency activists (Venkatesh Nayak and Anjali Bharadwaj), in August 2026, used the Right to Information Act (RTI) to understand both from the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Election Commission, how many such foreign nationals had been identified. Significantly, in the MHA reply in October, the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that it had neither information about the “Competent Authority” nor any list of suspected foreign nationals. The Election Commission, on its part, replied that it had no report showing how many suspected foreign nationals had been identified through SIR in different states.[3]
Then comes today, October 29, 2026, the icing on the cake.
The Hindustan Times reports that a relevantly insignificant 1,600 foreigners had been identified on the voter’s list of six states. Not lakhs or millions, one thousand six hundred! The size of the electorate in the six states, reports Himanshi Dahiya of the newspaper is 98.6 million. This ration shows how miniscule is the number as compared to the electorate here. In all, HT spoke to the CEOs of 26states and Union territories where SIR was completed or draft rolls published. Officials from 11 states responded. Six gave a count of suspected foreigners. Four said they didn’t maintain the data. Odisha said it found such cases but did not record a figure. While Karnataka as the CEO states had an overwhelming number of Nepalis, Jharkand had three persons on the rolls from Afghanistan. Two men of Nepalese origin were identified in Meghalaya, both married to Indian women! In Goa, authorities detected 419 suspected foreign passport holders, said it’s CEO Sanjay Goel while Punjab, Delhi, Uttarakhand and Telengana did not record data.
So what does this mean? A staggering 13.60 crores Indians (at least!) are disenfranchised today, though Vote for Democracy’s independent calculation suggests that the number may be above 16 crores! In December 2025, India’s Home Minister[4] defended the SIR as a means to “detect, delete, deport” alleged “infiltrators”,[5] a claim unfounded.
Among the large number of genuine voters from Bihar and West Bengal disenfranchised through this ad hic and arbitrary process (SIR), several thousand have –even while adjudication is under way– been deprived of other citizenship related benefits like access to government. schemes, even passports and the omnipresent Aadhaar car. While the apex court has underlined that the SIR cannot be an exercise in citizenship, the “deletion” from the electoral roll has had a ripple effect of such denials. Even scarier is the witch-hunt launched in the states of West Bengal and Assam –both states ruled by the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—to launch coercive deportation and expulsion drives (May 2025 in Assam and post May 2026 in West Bengal. This has resulted in, as reported by the Reporters Collective, The Wire, Human Rights Watch and Citizens for Justice and Peace, expulsions of ethnic Bengali Muslims, forcibly, without following the central government’s own deportation policy across the border to No Man’s Land and even Bangladesh![6] After the SIR process was completed, the BJP state government in West Bengal set up detention camps[7] in May 2026 under the “detect, delete, deport” policy and continued arbitrary detentions.
All these steps without due process, proof or accountability. By a government that has increasingly been functioning more and more undemocratically, feeding its supporters on hysteria and propaganda not reality or fact. And while the political Opposition has in the past months been rigorously opposing the ill-conceived SIR, the detrimental impact of this process on the lives of disenfranchised citizens is still a blur, concealed from the public gaze.
Who are these hapless Indians, a staggering 160 million of them who live today under the grave and potential shadow of statelessness? Indians need to know.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQnSBVGZy-k;
[2]https://ceo.karnataka.gov.in/uploads/PDF%20FINAL%20AC%20WISE%2027_1793094730.pdf
[3] https://thewire.in/rights/rti-reveals-in-sir-purging-of-ineligibles-from-the-voter-lists-might-be-a-bogey
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HowI1PVIwyE
[5] https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/patna/bihar-ration-card-list-trimmed-by-3-percent-using-sir-data-and-income-flags-10716206/
[6] https://indianexpress.com/article/india/election-commission-sir-draft-rolls-13-crore-deletions-delhi-leads-10857760/
[7] https://theprint.in/india/bengals-bjp-govt-tells-districts-to-set-up-detention-camps-for-illegal-bangladeshi-rohingya-migrants/2940338/
Related:
EXCLUSIVE – SIR: The total disenfranchisement of the Indian Voter is 16 crores, not 13.60 Crores?
SIR Karnataka: Six major ‘conspiracies’ exposed in the final electoral roll
Assam NRC: Seven years after 19 lakh people were excluded, rejection slips remain a non-starter