In this first part of a recent lecture, erudite public intellectual and political economist, Parakala Prabhakar argues that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by an obviously partisan Election Commission of India (ECI) is a sinister effort that will ensure the profound transformation of India’s democratic foundations and architecture.
This exercise—despite robust contestation –has been unfortunately endorsed by the Supreme Court of India. Despite being conducted with unaccountability to well established law and procedure, in haste and utter opacity that has already ensured the disenfranchisement of millions of Indians from the constitutional right to vote.
Delivering the P.V. Narasimha Rao Memorial Lecture 2026 at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University recently, Prabhakar elaborated on a theme that he has been de-constructing for close to a year.
Sabrangindia is publishing this lecture, in two parts, today and tomorrow.
If I were to ever consider myself privileged, blessed, and fortunate I will do so only for one reason: that is, I have known Sri PV Narasimha Rao personally.
Although I have known him since my childhood, it was mainly during my days in Delhi for my university education that I met him and came to know of him much more. I conversed with him, argued with him, learnt from him, sat in silence with him, ate with him, travelled with him, even played badminton with him.
This was an unearned privilege. I did not do anything to deserve it. I simply happened to be the son of his political colleague and friend. That privilege gave me an opportunity to watch one of the greatest personalities of modern India, close-up.
Delivering the PV Narasimha Rao Memorial lecture, therefore, is a very poignant occasion for me.
I express my gratitude to Professor Ghanta Chakrapani, his colleagues, and everyone in this great University associated with organising today’s lecture.
Alarm Bells
I would begin by sounding alarm bells.
We might not be able to hold this kind of gatherings freely in the coming days. You might have to check with the powers that be whether you could invite a particular speaker, whether the speaker could speak on a particular subject. You might even be asked to submit the text of the speaker’s address in advance for them to decide whether the speaker should be allowed to air this or that point of view. You might have to cancel speaking invitations – sometimes, even at the last-minute. To avoid all such chaos and loss of face, sooner than later, you might volunteer to abandon all such discourses.
This is a strong probability now. It is staring in our face. Have no illusions.
This year on the August 15, 2026 there is a good chance that our beloved Tricolour would be hoisted on the Red Fort. Whether it would fly there on the next Independence Day, I am not sure of. It is not difficult for you to guess which could be the flag to take the tricolour’s place.
Recently, the Union government has issued a circular. It is now mandatory that all the six stanzas of Vande Mataram are sung at all Union Government’s official gatherings and functions. The circular also laid down that Vande Mataram had to be sung before the National Anthem, Jana Gana Mana. Not before long, excuses would be made to dispense with Jana Gana Mana. They would say since they are running out of time and as they have already sung Vande Mataram, they might skip Jana Gana Mana. That excuse might sound innocuous. But that excuse would only be a transitory one, until Jana Gana Mana disappears. And then would follow an official decision to do away with Jana Gana Mana.
People who have keenly followed the recent 10-hour marathon discussion in our Lok Sabha on Vande Mataram cannot escape this fear.
The Union Government has recently constituted a High-Level Committee on Demographic Changes (HLCDC). The Terms of Reference of the Committee repeatedly mention ‘illegal immigration’ as one of the justifications for constituting the Committee. That makes obvious the government’s intention of branding certain communities as unwanted residents of this country.
Now, I have got these anxieties off my chest.
Marketing SIR: Effort to Clean Up Electoral Rolls?
I will now use the remaining part of the time given to me to speak about the currently ongoing massive exercise to revise Electoral Rolls in our country. It is called Special Intensive Revision (SIR). I would dwell on what it would mean to our cherished idea of India as a secular democracy and to our Republic that is committed to deliver justice, liberty, equality and fraternity to the people of this land. A staunch champion of these ideals was Babasaheb Ambedkar, after whom this great institution is named.
SIR is presented to the people as an attempt to clean up the electoral rolls. The Election Commission of India (ECI) marketed it as an exercise meant to delete the names of Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate (ASDD) voters from the rolls. It is also marketed as a measure to detect and delete foreigners from the voters’ lists.
If our electoral rolls had unacceptable number of such ASDD voters and foreigners in them, our previous elections and the mandates they produced, by implication, are rendered questionable. The successive Lok Sabhas and state assemblies – even the mandates of 2014, 2019 and 2024 as well as the governments those mandates produced – in effect, have to be treated as lacking in legitimacy. If that is the implication of the ECI’s claim of impure electoral rolls, then our democracy is and has been in grave jeopardy.
The present ECI, wittingly or unwittingly, is levelling a serious allegation against all the previous ECIs. As a consequence, it also makes the legitimacy of earlier mandates too questionable.
But as I would try to show here, the ECI’s claims about ‘impure’ electoral rolls and stated purpose of carrying out SIR lack conviction. The present ECI’s intent behind conducting SIR is dubious. It leads one to suspect that SIR is not an exercise to weed out ASDD voters but it is a part of the larger project to transform the nature and composition of the country’s political society.
Before I explore the nature of this project, I would like to dwell on the opacity of the ECI and the glaring irregularities that render the intent behind the SIR exercise, suspect.
SIR has to be evaluated against the justifications offered by the ECI. These justifications are:
1) Time Lapse: This is the primary justification. The ECI argued that more than 20 years have elapsed between the last Intensive Revision and now.
2) Demographic Shifts: Large scale urbanisation, large scale migration, and population changes resulted in demographic shifts and necessitated a comprehensive house-to-house clean-up.
3) Database Errors: the ECI had said that the Revision was intended to purge duplicate entries, ghost voters, unreported deaths and unverified entries from the voters’ lists.
These stated objectives are noble. I don’t think anyone in this room disagrees with these objectives. We all want our voter lists to be clean, free from errors. We do not want dead peoples’ names in the electoral rolls, we want duplicate names eliminated, unverified names deleted, and ghost voters removed.
We have a process called Special Summary Revision (SSR). This summary revision is carried out every year. It eliminates dead, shifted and absent voters. It includes persons who attained the voting age at that time and also adds who came into that area after the last such revision had happened.
ECI’s Opacity
After the 2024 General Elections SSR (Special Summary Revision) has taken place. Then on what basis did the ECI come to the conclusion that it should undertake (yet another) an intensive revision? In its affidavit to the Supreme Court of India (SC), responding to petitions that were filed challenging the constitutional validity of SIR, the ECI said an independent appraisal had found that there were errors in the electoral rolls after SSR.
When information about the ‘independent appraisal’ was sought under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, the ECI did not reveal any details. Until we started the meeting here, the ECI did not say who did the appraisal, what were its recommendations. It still refuses to put the report of that independent appraisal in public domain. No one has seen it.
The ECI has admitted on record in response to an RTI query that it had no record of why or how the SIR was initiated.
To another RTI query seeking “reference number of all files in which decision to initiate a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) across the country in 2025…” is to be found, Mr T.C. Kom, Principal Secretary of the ECI said, “…the requisite information is not available…in any material form.” He said that because the “…RTI Act mandated to disclose information which is available…in material form only” and since information on how the decision was taken on the SIR roll out was not available in ‘material form’, there was nothing for him to disclose.
The question that arises is: why is the decision to conduct SIR taken in secrecy and why are there no records in material form of files and correspondence in the Commission, if the intentions behind SIR are bona fide? Is this not opaque and highly suspect?
Suspicions and apprehensions about SIR are heightened after its completion in Bihar, followed by nine other states and three Union Territories. These states include West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Kerala, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan.
In Bihar about 80 lakh names were eliminated from the voters’ list and about 21 lakh voters were added. Over 2.04 crore voters were removed from UP’s electoral rolls, and 84 lakh new voters were added. The story is similar in every state. Deletions ranged between 24 lakhs in Kerala and 97 lakhs in Tamil Nadu, and over 2 crores in Uttar Pradesh.
The SIR deletions fail the demographic test. In all these states, the number of voters after the final revised electoral roll falls short of the size of the adult population in those states. Since ours is a democracy based on universal adult franchise, the number of voters should be equivalent to the adult population in a state. If a state’s adult population is 100, the number of voters in that state ought to be 100, ideally. If it is 99 or 101, one can accommodate that number. But it is unacceptable to have 70 or 130 voters in the final revised list. In UP, the final number of voters after SIR falls short of the state’s adult population by 2.83 crores. In Bihar, the figure is about 80 lakhs.
What accounts for this short fall? The ECI does not tell us.
Among the deleted, voters belonging to Minorities, Dalit and Adivasi communities, daily wage earners, poor and illiterate persons are disproportionately high in number. Among these sections, women constitute a substantial portion. Studies have established that SIR adversely impacted women’s potential political participation in our polity. Many among these are unlikely to know that they were disenfranchised. Even if they know they are too weak and incapable to make their protesting voices heard.
Was There an SIR Before?
The ECI claimed that SIR was done once before too, in the year 2002. I would like to ask those who are here today and who were voters in 2002 a question. Does anybody here recall having gone to any government official to prove you were eligible to be a voter? I was a voter in 2002. I never went to anybody carrying a bundle of documents to establish that I was eligible to be a voter. When I asked this question in different gatherings that I addressed in different parts of the country, so far not a single person said they had to prove their eligibility.
Therefore, the revision that happened in 2002 was entirely different from what is going on now in the name of SIR. The ECI is misleading the country.
When activists wanted to know what the 2002 revision’s guidelines were so that they could compare them with the present revision’s guidelines, they sought the information under RTI. The ECI said that they had no copy of the 2002 guidelines, and they were not obliged to give documents from over 20 years ago under the RTI rules. This again is far from the truth and reveals the opacity of the ECI.
There is one more misleading information from the ECI. The exercise conducted in 2002 was called Special Revision of an intensive nature. It was not Special Intensive Revision. It required the ECI to do the revision transparently by vetting the revisions against the then existing ‘mother list’. Those 2002 guidelines mandated that the exercise be carried out openly in Gram Sabhas and Ward Committee meetings.
Arbitrary revisions had no room in the 2002 revision.
Why is the ECI misinforming the country about the 2002 revision exercise?
SIR: Marketing vs Reality
From several investigative studies it has now come to light that many who were listed as dead are actually alive. Some of them were presented to the Supreme Court. The Hindu, a newspaper known for its diligent reporting, carried out a study in Tamil Nadu which found that the age of those listed as dead did not conform to the mortality trends in the official data on the basis of their age. The numbers defied the overall trend. In Bengal many deleted voters listed as dead and absent thronged the local government offices that were involved in SIR exercise.
In Bihar, the electoral roll that was supposed to have been cleaned up had 1.32 crore fake addresses. In Barachatti assembly constituency of the state 877 voters were shown as residing in one address in a village. In Pipra constituency’s Galimpur village 509 voters were registered in one address. The address was not just wrong. It does not exist. There are several such examples from the state. In all the 243 constituencies, 14.35 lakh duplicate voters were found by investigative journalists.
Weeding out of infiltrators or foreigners also turns out to be a phony claim. In Bihar the total number of objections raised on the basis of being foreigners were 1087. Out of which only 390 were found to be in order and accepted for verification. Of them only 76 were Muslims. And of them, 10 were in Seemanchal region. Of these 10 from Seemanchal, only five were Muslims. Of those five, 2 were dead. Finally, only 3 were identified as foreigners. But the viral propaganda in the social media continues to show that thousands of infiltrators have been detected and deleted and are now running away from the country in droves.
If weeding out foreigners and non-citizens was one of the primary concerns of SIR as claimed by the ECI, the most eligible candidate state for conducting the exercise ought to be Assam. If there was ever a state in the Indian Union where citizenship became the most contested issue, it was Assam. But it is ironic that the ECI decided to do only a Special Revision (SR) in the state, and not SIR. The total number of voters who were put in the doubtful category – the ‘D’ category – in the state during the NRC exercise was 19 lakhs. Of which 12 lakhs are Hindus and 7 lakhs are Muslims.
This data makes the ECI vulnerable to the charge that it did not conduct SIR in Assam to avoid because pronouncing 7 lakh Muslims ineligible for voting will requires it to pronouncing 12 lakh Hindus also ineligible for voting. After the SR in Assam, the total deletions amounted to under 3 lakhs. This figure is in stark contrast to the tens of lakhs of voter deletions in other states. In Assam, the officials went from house to house to update electoral rolls. The burden of enrolling was not put on the people there. That is not the case with the rest of the country. Why?
Despite clear evidence to the contrary, the narrative propagated by the ECI and the present ruling dispensation that SIR is meant only to clean up voters’ lists still has takers. Many do believe it.
Note: To be followed by Part 2: Disenfranchisement is the route Majoritarian Rule: The Political Logic of SIR examines how large-scale voter deletions could fundamentally reshape India’s political system.
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