Congress Demands Halt to ‘Unconstitutional’ SIR, Restoration of Deleted Voters

New Delhi: Flagging "wrongful deletions" in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the Congress on Monday demanded that the "unconstitutional" process must be stopped immediately and all illegitimately deleted voters must be restored to the voters' list.

Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh shared the screenshot of a media report which claimed that at least 100 voters from two polling booths in Delhi's Okhla constituency were found to have been wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD) during the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The report cited a public audit covering 258 households over seven days.

Ramesh said that a vast majority of deletions in the "disastrous" SIR process have been in the ASDD category -- Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate.

"The BJP and its unofficial spokespersons are using this to defend SIR as 'cleaning the voter rolls'," he said on X.

Ramesh pointed out that a public audit by civil society organisations in Delhi exposed the widespread wrongful deletions taking place in the name of "ASDD".

"They found at least 100 voters in just 2 polling booths who had been wrongly deleted under 'ASDD' -- most in the Shifted or Absent categories. Over 9 crore voters have been deleted across the country in these 2 categories alone. How many of them are genuine voters being denied their right to vote?" he said.

Reports also expose the reality of the "special camps" and door-to-door visits promised by the Election Commission of India in its various damage-control Press Notes, he said.

"Many wrongfully deleted voters are unaware of these camps and have not been contacted by their Booth Level Officers (BLOs)," Ramesh said.

"It should not be civil society but the ECI itself that is clearing up the mess created by its disastrous SIR. The illegal and unconstitutional SIR process must be stopped immediately. All illegitimately deleted voters must be restored to the electoral rolls," Ramesh demanded.

Last week, the Congress had termed the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) "illegal and unconstitutional" and demanded that the exercise be frozen and the names of all legitimate voters restored to the electoral roll.

Ramesh had described the SIR as a "Method Of Disenfranchising Indians".

Ramesh's remarks come amid a raging row after The Indian Express reported that election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected on record at least 14 times over the past 10 months to decisions and orders mostly related to the SIR process.

The EC has said that differing views and observations are a part of deliberations in any institution and all its orders carry full legal sanction and follow established statutory procedures.