The Congress on Monday accused the Election Commission of playing the game of “vote theft” in the 12 states and Union territories where the next phase of the special intensive revision would be carried out, including the three poll-bound states of Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
“In the name of SIR, names of 69 lakh voters were deleted. Now in these 12 states crores of voters will be disenfranchised. This is “vote theft” in broad daylight being carried out by Narendra Modi and the EC,” the party said in a statement.
The Congress said the SIR in Bihar had exposed the EC’s alleged conspiracy by the central poll panel which was called out by the apex court.
“Throughout the country different forms of vote thefts are being reported. In some places names are being deleted and in some added. The EC should have replied to these charges. The EC should have probed instead they continue to indulge in vote theft. The SIR in 12 states is a conspiracy against democracy. A conspiracy to snatch the rights of the people,” the Congress said.
Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin convened a meeting at the DMK headquarters soon after the announcement to discuss the issue, signalling the concern among Opposition-ruled states such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala and West Bengal, all of which are due for elections in 2026.
In Bengal, most crucial among the poll bound states, where the BJP is locked in a direct battle with the ruling Trinamool, SIR has already turned into a contentious issue.
“We have no problem with electoral roll revision. But if anyone tries to delete the name of any eligible voter on the instructions of the BJP, we will protest democratically,” said Trinamool spokesperson Kunal Ghosh.
Samajwadi Party MP Dimple Yadav, whose home state Uttar Pradesh is also in the list where the exercise will be carried out, said the government’s “intentions are unclear” and warned that the move “hurts the democratic nature of the country.”
AAP MP Sanjay Singh accused the poll body of acting as a “BJP agent.’
“Eighty lakh votes were stolen in Bihar after SIR. The claim of reining in infiltrators also turned out to be a damp squib,” Singh said.
Activist Yogendra Yadav called the nationwide SIR “a crude instrument of thoughtless mass disenfranchisement” that has now been “refined into a targeted weapon of exclusion.” In a post on X, he called it “not a measure to purify the electoral rolls but a mechanism for selective and arbitrary disenfranchisement and an exercise in verification of citizenship — an NRC by another name.”
“The EC continues to treat this as a citizenship verification exercise, with repeated claims of identifying illegal foreigners without any data,” Yadav said, adding that there was “no explanation of why such a cumbersome and exclusionary method has been chosen when the EC has better schemes like NREP for cleaning up of electoral rolls,” Yadav said.