The sinister SIR strike has now entered its second month in Bihar. At the end of the so-called house-to-house enumeration phase, the Election Commission of India has produced a draft electoral roll which has deleted nearly 6.6 million names from the revised voter list published in January 2025. The election commission has finally assigned three reasons for this massive exclusion exercise - 36 lakh voters who have allegedly permanently shifted from Bihar or have been found 'untraceable', 22 lakh voters who have reportedly passed away, and 7 lakh voters who are enrolled elsewhere. Intriguingly, these figures have been provided not in absolute numbers but as percentages, and the EC has also refused to share lists of deleted names with specified cause of deletion.
Three other very significant points need to be noted about this large-scale deletion of names. The figures recorded a massive jump in the concluding few days of enumeration. On 19 July, the 'total number of electors not found at their addresses' stood at 41,64,814 or a little over four million. A week later, the corresponding numbers had jumped to 6.6 million - a leap of nearly 2.5 million over a period of seven days. Secondly, amidst this massive deletion of names, there was not a single reported case of deletion on the grounds of foreign nationality. But just a few days ago in the middle of the enumeration campaign there were widespread media reports quoting unnamed 'ECI sources' about large-scale infiltration of foreign nationals from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal in Bihar's electoral rolls.
Equally striking is the sudden last-minute decline in the number of identified cases of multiple/duplicate entries from 7.5 lakh to 7 lakh. No wonder we now find investigative reports about five thousand dubious voters from UP in the 'SIR-purified' draft rolls of Bihar in one single constituency of West Champaran district. Or take the sensational case of Bihar's deputy CM and BJP leader Vijay Sinha, whose name continues in two places despite his own claim to have appealed for deletion in one case. If the Deputy CM of Bihar is a 'victim' of the SIR fraud in Bihar, one can easily imagine how fraudulent and farcical the entire exercise has been.
Yet we must never forget that the fraud has only begun. Even assuming the figures of death and duplication to be reasonably accurate, at least 4 million of the 6.6 million names that have been eliminated from the January 2025 rolls are surely victims of the SIR fraud. SIR for them has become an exercise in Special Intensive Removal. In the second phase of scrutiny of documents, the fate of several millions more will be decided by concerned Electoral Registration Officers or EROs. The kind of social and political bias that will creep in at this discretionary stage is not difficult to imagine. And these selective deletions will perhaps be complemented by Mahadevpura-style inclusion of 'new' voters on a scale that we have already witnessed in Maharashtra. If the SIR is not stayed, the electoral roll in Bihar is bound to become significantly even more flawed and skewed.
Our intervention in the SIR process from the very beginning has been aimed at exposing and challenging it in practice and generating awareness and alertness about the danger of mass disenfranchisement. The delinking of submission of enumeration forms from submission of supporting documents did lull many electors into a false sense of security, and the Sangh-BJP campaign against so called infiltrators - a veiled hate campaign against Muslims - also sought to prejudice the average voter's mind. But with the focus now shifting to the sword of deletion which has already affected large numbers of migrant workers and the entire spectrum of Bahujan communities, the communal narrative has failed to have much impact.
Meanwhile, the anti-disenfranchisement campaign in Bihar has received a big boost from the expose of the massive Mahadevpura vote theft by Rahul Gandhi. The sudden launch of the SIR which conflates the issue of the electoral roll with the contentious idea of a nationwide citizenship register, and the stubborn arrogance with which the EC is pushing this campaign, blatantly rejecting even the advice of the Supreme Court, has bolstered the people's resolve to intensify the battle to defend the Constitution and resist the fascist offensive. The Election Commission of India has never been this discredited in the history of the Indian Republic. Regardless of the future of the SIR hearing in the Supreme Court, the electors of Bihar and the people of India will have to summon all their strength and determination to foil the conspiracy to disenfranchise migrant workers and other marginalised sections and minorities and steal the Bihar elections. The people united shall never be defeated.
