A sense of unease and uncertainty dominates the political landscape in Tamil Nadu, where the enumeration of voters for the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls began on Tuesday.
“In Tamil Nadu, we will resist disenfranchisement and defeat #Vote Theft,” DMK leader and chief minister M.K. Stalin has been asserting in every public platform since the Election Commission announced the second phase of the SIR across 12 states and Union Territories, including Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Kerala and Puducherry, where Assembly polls are due by May 2026.
“To carry out an SIR just months before the elections, and especially during the northeast monsoon months of November and December (which have just begun), brings serious practical difficulties. To conduct the SIR in a hasty and opaque manner is nothing but a conspiracy by the EC to rob citizens of their rights and help the BJP,” Stalin claimed.
Stalin’s concerted action, taking all of the DMK’s allies in the INDIA bloc along with him in the campaign against the SIR, is aimed at protecting the right to vote, which forms the “foundation of democracy”, as the DMK leader puts it.
Stalin and DMK MP Kanimozhi had joined the Voter Adhikar Yatra led by Congress’s Rahul Gandhi and RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav in Bihar, where the SIR triggered widespread allegations of an attempt to disenfranchise large sections of voters.
As booth-level officers (BLOs) began the door-to-door enumeration drive in Tamil Nadu, an elderly woman in Madurai told a local TV channel: “They came to all houses in my area and gave each of us two (enumeration) forms.... They asked us to fill up the forms and give one to them, keeping the second with us. We do not know whether our names will make it to the final rolls. It is confusing. We already have Electoral Photo Identity Cards (EPIC).”
At an all-party meeting ahead of the SIR rollout, the DMK urged the EC to stall the exercise until all issues arising from the Bihar SIR were resolved and all “shortcomings” rectified.
The DMK’s organising secretary, R.S. Bharathi, has filed a petition in the apex court seeking to stay the poll panel’s October 27 order directing the second phase of SIR.
The resolution adopted at the all-party meeting accused the EC of being a “handmaid” of the Union government and acting in an authoritarian way.
“The reason for our apprehension is the way the SIR was rolled out in Bihar where there was targeted exclusion of Muslims and other sections opposed to the BJP from the electoral rolls,” the resolution said, and alleged a “conspiracy” to exclude eligible voters and include ineligible voters.
“Without rectifying the errors that took place in Bihar, the pan-India SIR now amounts to depriving the voting rights of the people and portends the burial of democracy,” it said.
The resolution sought the postponement of the SIR until after the 2026 Assembly elections, pointing to several “confusions” in the EC’s instructions to electoral registration officers (EROs), such as accepting Aadhaar as proof of identity but with “some conditions”.
The resolution flagged how the poll panel ignored crucial factors such as the impact of the northeast monsoon on farmers who form the bulk of rural voters and the ensuing festivals such as Christmas and Pongal.
The main Opposition AIADMK, the BJP and a few other regional outfits, who welcomed the SIR, boycotted the all-party meet.
Actor Vijay-led Tamizhaga Vetri Kazhagam did not attend the meeting but opposed the “undemocratic” SIR.
Besides mounting a legal challenge against the SIR, the DMK is keeping its ears to the ground. Stalin is interacting with district-, block- and panchayat-level office-bearers to ensure effective coordination between the party’s around 71,000 booth committee agents (BCAs) and voters so that “not a single eligible voter is left out”.
A “war room”, including eight legal experts, has also been set up at the DMK headquarters in Chennai for monitoring and assistance.
DMK Rajya Sabha member and secretary of the party’s legal wing, N.R. Elango, told reporters on Wednesday that they expected their petition to come up in the apex court on Friday or Monday. “We have drawn the Supreme Court’s attention to several statutory and rule violations by the EC in directing a pan-India SIR,” he said.
Elango said the “modifications” that the EC claimed they had introduced after the Bihar SIR “are even more confusing”. For instance, if a voter who is away from home does not fill up the “enumeration forms” by December 4, his name will be automatically struck off from the existing rolls, he said.
After the draft rolls are published on December 7, deleted voters will have to fill Form 6 (for the inclusion of name) afresh, and the EROs will have to verify that. “Where is the time for all this (with polls due in April-May)?” Elango said.
“The EROs will then give a notice asking for documents like birth certificates or passports that are not easily available in rural areas. The instructions do not specify how the deleted voter can seek redress,” the DMK MP said, adding that these “strengthen our apprehension that SIR is more for excluding voters than for inclusion”.