First they captured the money, then the umpire. Still failing to win outright in 2024, they turned to voters: SIR is part of a decade-long democratic rollback
Democracy begins with a simple proposition—the people choose the government.
Does that proposition still hold after the SIR?
That’s the question raised by the extraordinary investigation by The Indian Express’s Ritika Chopra and her colleagues into the functioning of the Election Commission (EC) of India during the SIR.
On September 23, the paper revealed that two of the three Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders taken, they said, without their knowledge. Their objections went to the heart of the electoral process—the addition, deletion and restoration of voters, changes to Form 6, appeals filed in the EC’s name, and control over the digital infrastructure that holds the electoral rolls. The changes to Form 6, in particular, were called “unauthorised and illegal”.
Also read: Trouble mounts for Gyanesh Kumar as Keralam reopens 2006 graft case
The EC is a three-member constitutional body, with the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) first among equals. The deeper meaning of the two Election Commissioners’ objections, including an accusation of “unauthorised and illegal” decisions and actions, is that the CEC broke the EC’s integrity and was marching to a different drum that only he could hear.
A decade-long story
It is not simply another controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. It raises a fundamental question: Who, in the end, exercises power over the conditions under which a citizen gets to participate in a democracy?
And this did not begin with SIR. SIR is only the latest stage of a story that began a decade ago. It is a story about the progressive acquisition of control over the machinery through which democracy is financed, administered and, ultimately, translated into power.
The first intervention was demonetisation. On November 8, 2016, 86 per cent of the value of currency in circulation was suddenly rendered invalid, in the name of a war on black money, corruption, counterfeit currency and terror financing.
Also read: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar continue; AISA activists, senior advocates held in Delhi
Did demonetisation help in recovering black money? Did it reduce currency transactions in the economy? Has it stemmed corruption? Has the counterfeit currency problem disappeared?
But something else did happen: Demonetisation, undertaken six months before the 2017 elections in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most politically consequential state, crippled the financial resources of the Opposition. The BJP won a landslide 312 of Uttar Pradesh’s 403 Assembly seats. The entire country was made to perform the demonetisation circus for it.
Second stage
Then came electoral bonds.
Cash donations had been condemned as unaccounted, dirty money. Electoral bonds were presented as the clean, formal alternative. The truth was that the government had devised a way for political parties to take unlimited donations by bearer bonds, which is as good as cash, secretly, with the ruling party naturally grabbing the lion’s share.
In 2019, I wrote an appeal to the Supreme Court arguing that the scheme was unconstitutional and must be scrapped. In 2022, I argued that demonetisation and electoral bonds were step one and step two of the BJP engineering a near-monopoly over election funding. In February 2024, the Supreme Court finally agreed, striking the scheme down as unconstitutional. By then the BJP had already collected more than Rs 8,200 crore in anonymous donations—a war chest no other party could match, amassed by simply making what had been illegal the law.
How to capture the voters
The next piece of machinery was the Election Commission itself.
Parliament had never enacted the law Article 324 contemplated for appointing Election Commissioners; in 2023, the Supreme Court directed the government to make one, and showed through an interim arrangement what a fair panel should look like — the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India, weighted equally.
Also read: Huge protests in Delhi, Mumbai demanding CEC's ouster; nearly 700 detained in Capital
The government made the law but replaced the Chief Justice with a Union Cabinet Minister of the Prime Minister’s own choosing—and who else could it be but Amit Shah—taking full control over who gets appointed. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi dissented against Gyanesh Kumar’s appointment as CEC. Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah went ahead anyway.
And now comes SIR.
What was the problem? Ah, yes — it was the Indian voter. Despite its near monopoly over election funding and control over the appointment of the Election Commissioners, hadn’t the BJP still failed to secure even a simple majority in 2024? The electorate itself had to be tamed.
Prove your grandfather voted, too
Voter list revision is ordinarily a periodic exercise required to keep electoral rolls clean. The dead, duplicates and people who have permanently moved should be removed.
But there is a basic democratic presumption that governs such an exercise. A citizen who satisfies the three conditions the Constitution prescribes—18 years old, an Indian citizen, and not legally barred from voting—is presumed entitled to vote. If the State believes a particular name does not belong on the roll, the burden is on the State to show it, case by case.
The SIR has reversed that default. It replaced the presumption of inclusion with a presumption of exclusion. It does not ask the State to identify suspect entries and investigate them. It asks the entire electorate to prove, on a clock, that it belongs on the roll at all. More than 13 crore names have been taken off draft rolls nationwide because they couldn’t.
Also read: SC split on CEC appointment law: Justice Datta says EC must be seen as independent
The State demands documentary proof of citizenship, yet India issues no single citizenship document to conclusively prove it. A citizen may accumulate voter IDs, ration cards, educational certificates, and even an Indian passport—issued by the Republic itself. Yet, in the middle of this exercise, the Ministry of External Affairs declared that an Indian passport is merely a travel document, not proof of citizenship. The State issues the paper but retains absolute discretion over whether it will accept it or not. A constitutional right is thereby degraded into a privilege granted by the administration.
And the proof demanded this time reached backward a generation. Under the altered Form 6, a young Indian could not even apply to become a voter without first establishing whether a parent or grandparent appeared on the electoral roll of the previous SIR two decades ago—as if the right to vote were inherited rather than an individual constitutional entitlement.
Two of the EC’s own three members called this change “illegal” and “unauthorised” on file, months before it became public. Former CEC OP Rawat has pointed out that the EC has no legal authority to amend statutory forms without presidential and rule amendments. Yet the change was pushed live onto the portal anyway.
Delete by any means
For those who got through that hurdle, the EC invented a digital exclusion mechanism—an opaque algorithmic filter called a “logical discrepancy”. Using centralised software, the system runs “progeny-mapping” against legacy rolls from 2002. There was no “logical discrepancy” in the Bihar phase of SIR. Four categories were introduced in the second phase, in West Bengal and other states. That became 11 categories in the third phase. The motto seems to have been to find as many reasons as possible to exclude voters of particular types coded into the algorithm.
Also read: EC’s SIR relief bypasses 22 lakh Bengal voters trapped in tribunal backlog
Thus, electors were flagged for deletion based on minor spelling variations across regional transliterations, an arbitrary age gap with an ancestor, or data-entry errors made decades ago by the State itself. One caller to a voter rights helpline had a twin; the software, unable to accept that two people could share a birth date, could not decide which of them belonged on the roll.
The algorithm is an uncodified black box. Yet, on its automated summons, millions are forced to stand in queues to prove they exist. The entire country is being made to perform a circus once again, just like it was during demonetisation ten years ago.
But suppose a citizen clears even that bar. Suppose the documents are in order and the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO)—the statutory authority empowered by law to decide—accepts them.
In Goa, 97 citizens were flagged for a “logical discrepancy” rather than deleted outright. Local officers heard their cases under Supreme Court directions and found them eligible, seeking only to clear the flag. But the software did not have a rollback option to reinstate them. The Goa Chief Electoral Officer sent eight urgent emails begging the EC to enable one. The centralised IT division in Delhi wouldn’t budge. The final roll was published, and all 97 voters were left out.
Demonetisation was notebandi. SIR was designed to be votebandi.
The exclusion machine has a third face, even uglier than genealogy and software: Organised interventions to get names deleted. In Karnataka, Booth Level Officers in multiple constituencies have reported receiving bulk Form-7 applications—the form used to object to a name already on the roll—arriving pre-printed with the names and EPIC numbers of Muslim voters. These have been traced as coming from members of the BJP. The state BJP president, BY Vijayendra, did not deny the targeting; he defended it, saying “illegal Bangladeshi immigrants” may have been added to rolls. Who this SIR machine is built to exclude was always suspected. Now it has been confirmed.
The inversion of democracy
It was all very clever.
Until a journalist started asking questions and India suddenly discovered that “purification” of the electoral rolls did not mean removing a few thousand, or even a few lakh, dead voters and duplicates. It meant that more than 13 crore names disappeared from the draft electoral rolls across the country.
Also read: Mass voter deletions during SIR: ‘Not voters’ responsibility to prove they are voters’
At that scale, it is no longer the citizen choosing their government. Now, the government is choosing its people. That is the inversion.
Bertolt Brecht’s The Solution was satire, not suggestion. But it seems our current rulers in Delhi took it seriously:
…the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Where does SC stand?
Demonetisation and electoral bonds captured the money that funds elections. The 2023 EC appointment law captured the constitutional body that runs elections. SIR was meant to capture the register of voters. If the SIR is allowed to stand, three of an election’s four load-bearing pillars—funding, umpire, voter—will have passed, in real measure, under one set of hands.
One pillar remains: The geography and geometry of the constituencies themselves. The bugle has already been sounded on delimitation — how many seats each state gets, and how voters in each seat will be rearranged. But that is a battle for another day.
Right now, the battle is on to reverse the SIR inversion. And to ensure that CEC Gyanesh Kumar pays for his role in this whole affair, notwithstanding all his efforts since The Indian Express expose to control the damage to himself and to his masters.
Gyanesh Kumar’s attempts to walk back on the decisions he took and implemented against the objections of his fellow Election Commissioners constitute a clear admission of guilt. Each of the nine decisions the EC announced on September 26, the subsequent decision to revert to the unaltered Form 6, and the directive to Block Level Officers to go on an enrolment drive to bring back the crores of voters deleted only go to expose the SIR plot for what it was.
Also read: Appointment dispute and internal dissent: EC faces a checks-and-balances question
The Delhi Police action of breaking up the Jantar Mantar protest and detaining more than 700 protestors on Gandhi Jayanti day is a clear signal from the government of the lengths it will go to protect Gyanesh Kumar and itself.
Millions of young people, civil society activists and ordinary citizens across the country have signalled that they understand what’s at stake and are willing to take to the streets to fight the good fight. More than 2,000 eminent citizens have written to the Chief Justice of India to initiate suo-motu proceedings against the SIR and Gyanesh Kumar.
What will the Supreme Court be at this historic juncture in the life of the nation and the Constitution: “Sentinel on the qui vive” or “Committed Judiciary”?
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
