Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | BJP Left Red-Faced After EC Backtracked on SIR

The September 26 press release of the Election Commission of India coming as it does after The Indian Express expose of how Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has been carried out from the middle of 2025 in the run up to the Bihar Assembly elections last November, reads like a mea culpa note for the highhanded manner in which the commission had gone about its work, deleting 13 crore of the nearly 100 crore electorate. The press note starts with the corrective measure: “In case of any person to whom notice has been issued during the ongoing SIR, for being unmapped and logical discrepancies, BLOs will visit the homes of such persons for collection of documents and thereafter upload them on the ECINet.” It is very clear that the SIR exercise has been predatory in nature, issuing notices and summoning people. There is both change of heart and of mind about how the SIR is to be conducted.

Two others of the several clarifications of the commission’s press release of penitence are that the for the meeting of the election commissioners the agenda will be prepared and after the meeting the minutes of the meeting will be released, and secondly though SIR has been completed in 20 states/UTs, those who have been left out can apply for enrolment. Also, that the CEOs (chief election commissioners) in the states have been asked to facilitate the continuous upgradation of the rolls. The final confession of the press note is that “it has been issued as per the decisions of the meeting of the Commission held on 26.09.2026 and has the approval of the full commission”.

Transparency at last! It appears so because there is much more than meets the eye, and that is the political agenda behind the SIR. It is pretty evident that the SIR is not the simple updating the electoral rolls which had happened every 10 years, and the break came after 2002.

The idea behind the SIR is to “detect, delete and deport” the infiltrators or the illegal immigrants which Union Home Minister Amit Shah declared in his reply to the debate on electoral reforms in the Lok Sabha in December 2025, six months after the SIR exercise began. Mr Shah was careful enough to talk about the cleaning up of the electoral rolls in terms of removing the names of the voters who had died, and those who moved places. But the emphasis was on the infiltrators who through their vote were deciding who would become the chief minister or the Prime Minister. Of course, Mr Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared the paranoid perception, that was the driving force behind the SIR. Yet, neither the Election Commission nor the Modi government would not disclose the number of illegal immigrants or ‘Bangladeshis’ detected during the SIR in West Bengal. There were not enough of them to fill the detention centres which were ostentatiously set up for the purpose.

The reason that the SIR exercise went rogue is to be traced to the firm belief of Mr Modi and Mr Shah that the electoral rolls must be purged of the names of the ‘Bangladeshis’. And of course the attempt to single out Muslims in West Bengal and Assam and call them Bangladeshis has ended up in deleting the names of ordinary Indian voters, including Muslims. It is a political agenda that has become self-defeating. Both Mr Modi and Mr Shah have tactfully distanced themselves from the overenthusiasm of the Gyanesh Kumar-led Election Commission, who had tried to keep the other two commissioners out of the frame. Mr Kumar is now forced to retrace his steps as his overzealous attempt to get rid of Bangladeshis on the voters’ lists has boomeranged in the face of the Indian Express expose. The common Indian voter was going through the trauma and tribulation of getting notices from the Election Commission as he felt helpless in the face of the commission’s absolute powers in deciding the voter’s right to remain a voter.

Whether or not the political opposition can make SIR into a powerful issue in the state Assembly elections due in 2027 and 2028, and in the run-up to the 2029 Lok Sabha elections, people have suddenly realised that the Modi government is losing its democratic credentials. The fact that the SIR has come after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, where the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faced its worst electoral setback, raised the suspicion that the BJP wants to manipulate the electoral system to claw its ways back to the position that it had in the 2014 and the 2019 parliamentary elections. It is the near-defeat that the Modi-led BJP suffered in 2024 that is behind the desperation to manage the electoral rolls and to push for one nation, one election. But desperate measures never pay dividends. The SIR programme has not really worked for the BJP as can be seen in the Election Commission’s blunders in going about the job. The one nation, one election may also go against the BJP going by the 2024 mood. Of course, the BJP is finding solace in the several state Assembly elections it had won from Maharashtra, Haryana and Delhi to Bihar, West Bengal and Assam.

The botched SIR exercise is a big defeat for the BJP after its major defeat in 2024. It was inevitable that the right-wing party should have lost its way even as it completed 12 years in power. The party entertains the grand illusion that it would remain in power till 2027 to usher in Viksit Bharat. Politics is a game of glorious uncertainties, much more than even cricket. Mr Modi’s much-touted charisma is unlikely to keep the party in power for long. It is clear the Modi charisma did not work in 2024. Even a divided political opposition may not be of much help to the BJP. When they look back, the BJP leaders will recognise that SIR was a policy blunder. It has hurt the party’s image in the eyes of its own supporters. The BJP strategists thought that they can manage the political system through democratic means. Unintentionally, Mr Gyanesh Kumar fumbled and bumbled leaving the top two leaders, Mr Modi and Mr Shah, red-faced.