Published : Oct 24, 2026 11:00 IST – 4 MINS READ

Vaishna Roy

On my voter card, “Vaishnaroy” is how my name appears. It is a usage I have often heard in Tamil Nadu, where the naming convention mostly forgoes surnames, so my name is simply made into a single word. Equally, were someone to write my name in Devanagari, they might write it as राय and not रॉय, the absence of that tiny breve changing Roy to Rai. Tamil scorns the difference between Rahul and Ragul, as does Bangla between V and B. Very often, such anomalies are introduced by the state, by the teachers or patwaris who do the paperwork. And the state once knew this, so despite the mad errors one finally did get the papers needed to work or travel or vote. But what happens when the state is both inept and malevolent? The SIR happens.

Reams have been written about how the SIR process has been subverted by an Election Commission of India (ECI) whose reputation is now beyond repair, but we can draw a few overarching inferences. One, the “state” is no longer some Indians working with other Indians towards a common goal; it is now an alien entity that considers all Indians its enemies. Its first reflex is suspicion, which it has fed into the insane algorithm created for the SIR—you can no longer assume that “everyone knows” Md means Mohammed or that Mukherjee and Mukhopadhyay are the same or that the Rai-Roy mix-up is common. The algorithm does not know, so the algorithm will delete you.

Two, the primary intent behind the exercise is not to revise but to delete, so the process seeks reasons, however absurd, to do so: twins are thrown off the rolls because they fail the nine-month-gap-between-siblings rule, women are deleted if their marital name changes, diplomats are deleted if they were posted abroad during the previous SIR.

Three, the manic push for digitisation does not merely indulge a technocratic wet dream, it is meant to create an active weapon against citizens—to surveil, control, track, and now to disenfranchise. A truly “digital” state would know that using AI or OCR to convert the 2002 PDFs will create errors, like making Esha Ghosh into Eso Ghosh. But when digitisation is only another form of hostility, the ECI either harasses voters for impossible proofs or simply deletes them.

Finally, the fourth corollary, the one that most clearly elucidates the emphasis on “purification” that we have repeatedly heard since 2025 when the SIR was launched in Bihar. Alongside the BJP’s overweening ambition to be in power forever is the Sangh Parivar’s long-standing desire to define citizenship by religion. Not only have over 13 crore names been deleted, there are strong indications that population segments might have been targeted by voting patterns or religion or marginality.

In West Bengal’s Nandigram, 95 per cent of the deleted voters are reportedly Muslim. In Delhi, areas with large Muslim and Scheduled Caste populations such as Okhla or Patel Nagar have seen over 40 per cent deletions. Manipur has seen higher deletions in Kuki-Zo and Naga majority areas. Targeted deletions through the misuse of Form 7 have been rampant, Form 6 was unilaterally repurposed, and new evidence points to the secretive centralisation of ECINET, allowing deletions to be managed not by regional officers but by a kill switch in New Delhi. The “pure” list is thus really a carefully engineered list. The ECI’s rapid back-pedalling after the public uproar only reinforces its knowing culpability and is hardly enough to rectify this enormous crime.

The BJP gave ample warning of its intentions: In 2024, the Centre enacted the law that gives the executive a majority in the committee selecting the Election Commissioners. The same law grants the Commissioners legal immunity for life. The stage was set for large-scale electoral manipulation, and the ECI was suitably manned to ensure it would not display any signs of independence, objectivity, or indeed legality.

Allegations of fraud have persisted since the 2024 Lok Sabha election and subsequent Assembly elections, but it has taken the spate of recent revelations to ignite public anger against this carefully planned takeover of the electoral process. We might now be at a moment of reckoning, when citizens finally stop a rogue state from running amok, but we also know that this is a state that will not be stopped so easily.