I have no sympathy for the fashionable argument that India’s electoral rolls should be treated like a family WhatsApp group: once a name enters, nobody may ever remove it, however outdated the record becomes. People die, migrate, register twice, change constituencies and occasionally remain listed at addresses they left years ago. A serious democracy verifies its rolls. That is why I support the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision in principle, and why the opposition’s demand to scrap the exercise wholesale strikes me as political theatre rather than policy. Yet support for verification cannot mean indifference to its execution. If eligible citizens struggle to understand notices, if digital systems obstruct appeals or if deletion decisions cannot be explained cleanly, the Commission weakens the very reform it is trying to defend. My position is straightforward: proceed with SIR, publish more evidence, simplify restoration and fix the machinery quickly. The choice is not between dirty rolls and disenfranchisement. A competent state must avoid both.
The principle is stronger than the protest slogan
The Commission’s stated test is sensible: no eligible citizen should be excluded and no ineligible person should remain included. Its official account of SIR’s third phase describes house-to-house work involving hundreds of thousands of booth-level officers and party-appointed agents. That matters because critics often speak as though a clerk in Delhi presses a delete key against constituencies selected by the ruling party. The actual exercise is dispersed, physical and open to participation by political parties. Electoral-roll revision is also not an invention of Narendra Modi, Gyanesh Kumar or some alleged twenty-first-century authoritarian laboratory. It is an ordinary function of election administration. The opposition knows this. What it dislikes is the political inconvenience of defending every questionable entry while simultaneously claiming that Indian institutions are incapable of checking anything fairly.
I do not accept the INDIA alliance’s habit of treating any verification requirement as presumptively sinister. The same parties demand flawless welfare databases, accurate caste counts, perfect beneficiary lists and rigorous action against duplicate ration cards. Yet when the subject is the electoral roll, basic record maintenance suddenly becomes an assault on citizenship. That inconsistency is revealing. A voter list is not a commemorative plaque. It is an operational register tied to residence, age and eligibility. Refusing to revise it does not protect democracy; it protects errors. Opposition leaders are entitled to challenge particular deletions, deadlines and procedural deviations. They are not entitled to replace evidence with the endlessly reusable phrase “vote theft” and expect the rest of us to suspend thought.
The government’s supporters should nevertheless resist a lazy counterargument: that anyone worried about exclusions must secretly favour illegal voting. Plenty of ordinary citizens have good reason to fear bureaucratic mistakes. India’s names are transliterated inconsistently. Women often change addresses after marriage. Migrant labourers may lack tidy documentary histories. Tenants move frequently, and elderly voters cannot always navigate an app or chase an official across offices. None of those facts invalidates revision. They define the administrative challenge. A reform earns legitimacy by handling difficult citizens fairly, not merely by processing easy files efficiently. The Commission should regard every wrongful exclusion as a serious service failure even if the overall exercise remains lawful and necessary.
A clean roll needs a visible audit trail
The Commission already provides a national citizen-services portal through which people can search and submit registration material. That is useful, but a portal is not transparency by itself. A voter facing exclusion should be able to learn, in plain language, which field triggered scrutiny, what document can resolve it, who made the decision and how long an appeal should take. The system should produce a dated receipt at each stage. Political parties should receive constituency-level aggregates showing additions, removals, reasons and restoration rates, with privacy safeguards. Independent researchers should get anonymised datasets sufficient to test whether particular communities, age groups or localities were disproportionately affected. If the Commission’s work is sound, sunlight will strengthen its case.
This is where I part company with those BJP sympathisers who think institutional loyalty means applauding opacity. It does not. The Election Commission is constitutionally independent, not an extension of the party office, and the government gains nothing when every procedural question is answered with injured indignation. Clear disclosure would puncture much of the opposition’s rhetoric more effectively than another press conference denouncing conspiracies. If deleted entries largely reflect deaths, migration, duplication or unreturned forms, publish the categories. If a software rule identifies discrepancies, explain the rule without exposing personal data. If officials reverse a flawed form or workflow, say why. Correcting an error is not an admission that the entire exercise was malicious. Mature administrations revise decisions; insecure ones pretend they never stumble.
I would also separate draft exclusion from final disenfranchisement more clearly in public communication. A draft roll is precisely that: a stage at which claims and objections can be made. But legal distinctions mean little to a citizen who sees a missing name and hears political workers shouting that the vote has already been stolen. Every draft publication should therefore arrive with an aggressive restoration campaign: SMS messages where numbers exist, printed lists at accessible public buildings, weekend camps, mobile teams for remote settlements and special assistance for senior citizens and persons with disabilities. The burden cannot rest entirely on the voter. Verification is a state project, so remediation must be a state responsibility too.
The opposition prefers a bonfire to a repair manual
What does the opposition offer instead? Mostly a sequence of maximalist demands: halt SIR, resign, return to older procedures, distrust the machines, distrust the officials and assume partisan motive before examining a constituency file. This is politically convenient because process improvement is dull. A march produces photographs; a reconciliation table does not. Congress in particular has perfected nostalgia as an administrative philosophy. We are invited to imagine a lost republic where rolls were pristine, institutions universally trusted and no citizen ever encountered a capricious babu. Anyone who has dealt with older paper records knows how unserious that fantasy is. The answer to digitisation problems is better digitisation combined with human appeal, not a retreat to illegible registers and patronage at the local office.
There is also an uncomfortable question for parties claiming mass deletion: where are their booth-level agents? The Commission’s design explicitly allows political parties to appoint BLAs who can monitor enumeration, flag omissions and help citizens. A party cannot neglect this granular work and then compensate with televised fury. The BJP built much of its electoral advantage through booth organisation, not magic. Opposition parties that prefer social-media allegations to ward-level verification are making a strategic choice, and voters should not confuse that choice with institutional exclusion. If Congress and its allies believe lakhs of eligible supporters are missing, they should publish constituency-wise case lists, assist every affected voter and pursue statutory remedies. Evidence assembled at scale would be harder to dismiss than slogans.
Still, numbers alone cannot settle legitimacy. Even a small proportion of wrongful deletions may represent many citizens, and voting is not a benefit to be rationed according to an acceptable error percentage. That is why I favour automatic escalation for unresolved exclusions, independent sampling of deletion files and public performance dashboards for electoral registration officers. Officials whose decisions are repeatedly overturned should receive retraining or face consequences. Appeals should not disappear into a procedural cellar. These are not concessions to an anti-EC campaign. They are the safeguards that make a nationwide cleanup durable enough to survive changes of government.
Reform is defended by making it work
The BJP and the Union government should give the Commission institutional space while urging administrative responsiveness rather than joining every partisan skirmish. A governing party benefits from accurate rolls, but it also bears a heavier political responsibility to avoid triumphal language when citizens are anxious about their status. Ministers and party spokespeople should tell supporters to help neighbours verify registrations regardless of party preference. That would demonstrate confidence. Nothing would answer the “vote theft” charge more convincingly than BJP workers helping an opposition voter restore a valid entry. Democratic legitimacy is not a zero-sum booth calculation.
I would keep SIR, extend deadlines wherever caseloads justify it, standardise reason codes, fund more local help desks and publish weekly restoration data. I would also commission a post-exercise audit by respected election administrators and technical experts, with findings placed in the public domain. The Commission should treat usability as a constitutional concern, not a customer-service garnish. A form that ordinary Indians cannot understand may be legally perfect and democratically defective at the same time.
My disagreement with the opposition is therefore not that every official choice has been immaculate. It plainly has not. My disagreement is with its conclusion that imperfections prove conspiracy and that revision itself must be abandoned. That leap is intellectually dishonest and administratively reckless. India deserves electoral rolls that are inclusive because they are accurate, not inclusive because nobody dares maintain them. The Commission now has to prove that accuracy and accessibility can coexist. If it repairs weak processes openly, SIR can become a valuable national reform. If it hides behind authority, it will hand professional outrage merchants an avoidable victory. I want the reform to succeed, which is precisely why I refuse to clap at every procedural misstep.
