Dear Congress Leaders of Karnataka…
SIR is a sinister, unconstitutional machinery created by the majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and it is surprising that, instead of echoing the national stand of your party leadership, state leaders claim otherwise. Several of you state, surprisingly, that the “SIR has been properly conducted in our state (Karnataka).” This claim is not just a deception and a betrayal of the people. As the latest high exclusion figures show, and Karnataka has reduced its electorate by 18 per cent, second only to Arunachal Pradesh that saw a 22 per cent slashing of legitimate voters. It is more than evident that a devious game of selective exclusion of voters has also been played here.
The SIR is an unlawful process that makes no distinction between states. During the on-going of the process here, for state Congress leaders to claim that “the process was properly conducted constitutes duplicity and betrayal. While it is true that within the various forms of manipulation, the “additional excesses” involving Mapping of the Voters and Form 7 deletions have occurred on a greater scale in other states than here, in Karnataka, this positive development followed the exposure of the internal machinations of the ECI by the Indian Express (September 23, 2026), that was further followed by a dharna (sit-in) by the Karnataka state cabinet in front of the Election Commission’s office in Karnataka. Hence, the excesses involving Mapping and Form 7 were somewhat less severe in Karnataka compared to other states.
However, these were just as many serious excesses committed within the SIR process.
In reality, the fundamental conspiracy of SIR lies in the ASDDO categories (categories of Absent/Shifted/Dead/Duplicate/Other) that the maximum exclusions have been in-built. The CEC, Karnataka (as also in other states) provides no details of these exclusions and these are, as has been established in West Bengal and elsewhere, clearly designed to deprive Dalits, oppressed communities, minorities and migrant workers of citizenship itself.
The Congress party never opposed this method, either ideologically or politically, right from the beginning. While you loudly demanded the scrapping of SIR in states where Congress governments were not in power, neither your governments nor your party made appropriate and vigorous efforts to prevent it in states governed by Congress.
Instead, the public statements and whispers in the corridors of power from among your leaders during and after the SIR process (in Karnataka) clearly reveal either confusion or political selectivity: how to protect Congress voters alone within the SIR process. (The irony is that your party did not even manage to do that properly!). That is precisely why Karnataka has witnessed the highest number of SIR deletions in the entire country.
Despite the large numbers of deletions, here is what the state leadership of your party has to say “SIR has been properly conducted in Karnataka.”)
–At the start of the process, when the SIR process began in Karnataka, your then Chief Minister declared that he would not “politicise SIR.” Read this here.
— After D. K. Shivakumar became Chief Minister, he went even further. By threatening that people would not receive benefits under schemes such as Anna Bhagya and Gruha Lakshmi unless they filled out the Enumeration Form and actively participated in SIR, he worked to ensure the success of the ECI-union government’s sinister SIR process! Read this here.
—When the draft electoral rolls were released in August 2026 and 1.08 crore voters out of Karnataka’s total electorate of 5.54 crore were deleted, this did not appear to cause the Karnataka state Congress leadership any anxiety or raise alarm bells. Instead, the Cabinet Minister Ramalinga Reddy began speaking in tune with the BJP leadership. For example, Mr. Suresh Kumar (BJP). Arguing that Bengaluru’s electorate had fallen by nearly half and therefore there was no longer any need for six municipal corporations, he effectively endorsed the SIR conspiracy that had expelled 55 lakh former voters of Bengaluru, without questioning this dangerous development in the slightest. Read this here
—Now, last week, another Cabinet Minister, Satish Jarkiholi, has asserted that SIR was “properly conducted” in Karnataka. Read this here. After objections to this began to emerge, the explanations he offered were entirely about preventing the BJP’s Form 7 irregularities in Karnataka. However, he expressed neither concern nor outrage over the expulsion of one crore voters through the opaque ASDDO listings, which constitutes the fundamental method of exclusion in the ongoing SIR process.
Hence, cannot it be said that, through the Congress government’s and party’s indirect cooperation, token opposition and active indifference, the current ECI’s project has succeeded in expelling the largest number of eligible voters in the country in Karnataka? The deletion of one crore voters from Karnataka’s final SIR electoral rolls is itself proof of this. These are migrant workers, wage labourers, Dalits, Adivasis and minorities who are not even aware that their names have been deleted. To expel them without due process and any transparency and accountability is the very essence of the conspiracy behind the BJP-inspired SIR.
If the Congress, too, defends this as proper, what difference remains between you and the BJP?
1) When such inherently anti-democratic exclusions and “conspiracy” is unfolding before your very eyes, are your leaders not betraying the one crore eligible voters of Karnataka by uncritically defending it with statements such as:
“…SIR has been properly conducted. Only dead persons, duplicate voters, or those who have migrated have been deleted.” Of the one crore voters deleted, only 25 lakh are supposedly dead or duplicate voters. (Even that calculation is problematic. Nevertheless…)
What about the remainder 75 lakh voters? Have 50 lakh voters of Bengaluru migrated out of the city during the past one year? When every other indicator establishes that more and more people are migrating to Bengaluru from every corner of the state, SIR alone comes up with the excuse that 75 lakh eligible voters have migrated away. It is these unfortunate migrant workers are who have been categorised as “Shifted” in their native villages and again as “Shifted” in Bengaluru. In neither location have they therefore retained their essential Constitutional right to Vote.
Where exactly has the Modi government shifted these poor migrant workers to? To the gallows of citizenship denial?
Why is the Congress accepting such a massacre of voters by the BJP instead of rejecting it outright?
2) According to the Constitution and the law, voters categorised as “Shifted” or “Absent” are not thereby automatically disqualified voters.
The Supreme Court reiterated precisely proposition last week. Therefore, it is the duty of the Election Commission to trace these eligible voters wherever they are and bring them into the electoral process. Instead, through the SIR, the “BJP-influenced Election Commission” has been transferring this responsibility of retaining voters onto innocent voters themselves.
The question I ask is, by declaring that the SIR has been properly conducted, is the Congress not indirectly defending this betrayal by the BJP’s Election Commission and thereby becoming indistinguishable from the BJP itself?
3) Nobody is opposing the revision of electoral rolls. There are legally established procedures for doing so, namely SSR (Special Summary Revision) of the electoral rolls.
For the past 78 years, electoral rolls have been revised through these procedures, and 18 Lok Sabha elections and hundreds of Legislative Assembly elections have been successfully conducted. Yet, the BJP and Gyanesh Kumar headed Election Commission introduced the SIR with the questionable motive not of electoral roll revision, but for citizenship revision. The Election Commission itself has admitted this before the Supreme Court.
This is essentially an unconstitutional process. By declaring that everything is proper within the SIR, is the Congress not endorsing the BJP’s Kar Seva against the Constitution?
4) Another justification offered by the BJP for conducting the SIR was the need to expel illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. Before SIR, the BJP and the Sangh Parivar had created a huge uproar, claiming that there were more than 20 lakh Bangladeshi infiltrators even in Karnataka. The Congress Chief Minister D. K. Shivakumar, too, had indirectly accepted this claim. Now, it has become clear, that only one Bangladeshi has been identified in Karnataka.And across the entire country, at most 1,600 illegal foreigners!! Three-fourths of them are Nepali Hindus.
Election Commission’s SIR exercise identifies just 1,600 foreigners on voter lists in six states
https://t.co/bIRP1CUDeW
— Hindustan Times (@htTweets) October 29, 2026
Thus, the very objective of SIR was to use the pretext of Bangladeshi infiltrators to inflame anti-Muslim hatred across the country. And the same conspiracy was carried out in Karnataka too, was it not? If that is the case, does your argument that SIR has been properly conducted in Karnataka not amount to supporting the BJP’s fascist project?
Therefore dear Congress men and women, Reject the SIR too in Entirety! In states where your party is in power and all over India!
Related:
SIR’s elusive illegal immigrants: Bogey Busted but will the injustices heaped be corrected?
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