Exclusion by design: Sagrika Rajora on Delhi’s SIR voter roll clean up

Delhi SIR: The human cost of mass voter deletions | Frontline Conversations The discussion examines the relationship between SIR and citizenship concerns, the constitutional implications of disenfranchisement, and why the scale of deletions matters in a democracy. | Video Credit: Host: Soni Mishra; Camera: Dipesh Arora and Deepanshu Chhabra; Editing: Razal Pareed; Producers: Mridula Vijayarangakumar and Muhammed Mukhtar T H The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is underway in Delhi, where the government has excluded 47.7 lakh of the national capital’s 1.45 crore registered voters from the draft roll, categorising them as “uncollectable” under Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate and Others (ASDDO). Roughly a third of Delhi’s electorate does not appear in the draft list, with Tughlaqabad recording the highest deletion rate in the city, at over 48 per cent. Voters missing from the list can file objections through Form 6 before the final roll is published on 4 November. Anecdotal evidence has been mounting of the difficulties faced by Delhi’s migrant population and the poor in staying on the rolls through this process. Voter Adhikar Manch, a citizens’ collective, has been helping residents of resettlement colonies and slums navigate the SIR, while also raising these concerns directly with the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Delhi Chief Electoral Officer (CEO). Sagrika Rajora of Voter Adhikar Manch speaks to Frontline about what her organisation has documented on the ground—and why it describes the process as “exclusion by design.”Edited excerpts: More than 47 lakh names out of 1.45 crore have been removed from Delhi’s voters’ list—roughly one in three. How do you view this scale of exclusion? Break it down and it’s larger than it looks. Across Delhi’s 70 assembly constituencies, 47.6 lakh exclusions works out to around 68,000 per constituency. Across the roughly 14,900 polling booths, that’s 318 removals per booth—each of which has only 1,000 to 1,500 voters. So a quarter to a third of each booth is being wiped out. The exclusions fall into four broad categories. The first happened before SIR even began. The CEO’s press release after the draft roll said 1.45 crore voters exist in total, a number frozen as of June 16. But their own press notes show 1.56 crore voters in January 2025, 1.48 crore in May, and 1.45 crore in June—a drop of 7.9 lakh from January to May, and another 3 lakh from May to June. That’s intensified deletion right before the process began. They’ve also claimed 100 per cent distribution of enumeration forms. On the ground, we’ve met many people who say they never saw a Booth Level Officer (BLO) or an enumeration form at all—or who received one but weren’t allowed to submit it.

Sagrika Rajora is the co-founder of Voter Adhikar Manch. | Photo Credit: Dipesh Arora Were people informed before their names were removed? No. This has been our most recurring complaint—no notice, no intimation. We flagged this to the ECI and the CEO early on. When people tried reaching their BLOs, they were told they “weren’t home” or, in the case of married women, that they no longer counted as residents. I heard this often: women who married and moved would return to vote from their marital home. One woman told me she’d voted from her mother’s house every year—only to find, when the BLO visited during SIR, that her mother was told, “Your daughter doesn’t actually live here, so she won’t get a form.” Also Read | Who is an Indian citizen? Of the 47.5 lakh excluded, 31.59 lakh are marked as permanently shifted, 11.73 lakh untraceable, 2.82 lakh dead, and 1.41 lakh duplicates. Given Delhi’s large migrant and poor population, how do you read these numbers? Many people who filled forms online found their BLO never processed them—rendering the form “untraceable” through no fault of the elector. There’s also an online option letting some voters link through a parent’s record from a different state’s SIR rolls; this was accepted in Haryana but rejected in Delhi for the same category of applicant. The process isn’t uniform across states. On permanently shifted cases—this isn’t only about people moving cities. Poor and working-class families shift within the same locality due to demolitions, what people here call “Bulldozer Raj.” Near Max Hospital, some 150–200 families displaced by rent or demolition never got enumeration forms because the BLO said they weren’t at their original address. Locating them should be the Election Commission’s job, not theirs. The CEO’s reply to an AAP representation cited Wazirpur as a success story—but people there received enumeration forms addressed to homes the state itself had demolished. In Begumpur, we saw two neighbouring households get identical treatment from the same BLO, yet only one form was actually collected. One BLO told voters the deadline was 30 July; the real deadline was 17 August. In Begumpur, residents also described a partisan pattern—BJP supporters got help finding their 2002 records, while others were marked absent without their forms even being collected. Working people who are out earning during the day get marked absent too, since they’re rarely home when the BLO calls, and BLOs don’t call back at night. How did BLOs handle the process overall? Unevenly. Some—often ASHA and Anganwadi workers, or schoolteachers—worked hard to trace people. But the process itself is too technical for an ordinary person. I struggled myself, tracing my own family’s 2002 details. The second-highest category of exclusion we documented was invented rules—BLOs telling people that tracing lineage through a maternal grandparent required being a widow, which is untrue; anyone can do it. There’s no training, no clear communication, and in places, real discretion to exercise bias.

Booth Level Officers (BLOs) distribute enumeration forms to every household for verification in New Delhi on July 3, 2026. | Photo Credit: Sushil Kumar Verma You’ve called this “exclusion by design.” Do you believe it’s deliberate? Yes. The process itself is built to be inaccessible—even the BLOs administering it can’t navigate it. Officials repeat the phrase “no eligible voter left out, no ineligible person included”, quietly conflating voting rights with citizenship, even as they insist SIR has nothing to do with citizenship. But it renders people vulnerable to citizenship scrutiny at the appeals stage, and we’ve already seen what that leads to in West Bengal—detention. The effects go beyond voting: landlords are telling tenants, “your name isn’t on the roll, so you’re probably Bangladeshi.” That’s real disenfranchisement, not just symbolic. There’s no uniformity across states—Noida uses Booth Level Agents (BLAs) for this process, Delhi uses BLOs, and both informally delegate to volunteers. We asked that the Absent-Shifted-Dead-Duplicate (ASDD) list be published before the draft roll, as happened in Karnataka, where it let 3 lakh people correct their entries. That never happened here, so people can’t go back—they must file Form 6 and declare, falsely, that they’ve never voted before, erasing their own family’s voting history. Would refiling under Form 6 amount to misuse, or is it illegal? It’s wrong on its face. The Supreme Court requires a proportionality test applied to actual implementation, not the idea of clean rolls in the abstract. Nothing here shows this scale of exclusion was necessary or the least intrusive option—the ASDD list could easily have been published first. Form 6 forces people into what is effectively a false declaration, with no exemption for anyone caught up in SIR. Delhi held Assembly elections just over a year ago. How does this scale of exclusion compare to those results? Several people who voted in 2025 have since found their names missing entirely—which is alarming, since their eligibility was already verified at the time. Working with the Sabar Institute on data analysis, we found that in 68 of 70 constituencies, the number of deletions exceeds the victory margin from the 2025 election. In Sangam Vihar, for instance, the winning margin was about 300 votes—far smaller than the deletions there. This isn’t an allegation about the 2025 result; it shows a structural problem too large to treat as routine correction. Do you suspect selective exclusion? Yes. There’s a 65 per cent drop in the third-gender voter category, against 20–30 per cent for men and women. At the Garima Greh shelter, the required Guru-Chela lineage documents were rejected outright by BLOs. We’ve also seen exclusions skew toward religious minorities—one case where a Hindu mother’s name made the draft roll but her Christian husband’s did not. In Muslim-majority areas, we’ve heard people describe their crossed-out names in red on BLO lists, and comparatively curt treatment. With roughly 13,000 BLOs against the BJP’s own claimed 12,000 Booth-Level Agents, the latter—being party-appointed—hold real influence over the process. In one case, an interfaith couple seeking a routine address correction (Form 8) were told their EPIC number was invalid; it verified fine when we checked online, but they were never issued the form. The highest exclusion rates cluster in Southeast Delhi, Okhla, and Tughlaqabad—areas with both large Muslim populations and recent demolitions.

A woman gives her thumb impression on a document after having her details verified by a Booth Level Officer (BLO) from the Election Commission during the SIR in New Delhi on July 1, 2026. | Photo Credit: Manish Swarup/AP What concerns you about the claims-and-objections period ahead? The response window is 15 days, and the clock starts when the Electoral Registration Officer signs the notice—not when the person actually receives it. Final rolls are due 4 November; anyone notified in late October has almost no real time to respond. Also Read | SIR is destroying the ethos of Indian citizenship What’s the mood on the ground? People are anxious, not indifferent. I haven’t met a single person in Delhi who said they didn’t want to be on the rolls at all. But the ECI’s claimed “extensive awareness campaigns” haven’t reached a single locality we’ve worked in—no slum, no resettlement colony, no urban village. Article 51 asks citizens to question and reform—but that requires the state to create space for it, which isn’t happening. The ECI responded to a political party’s press statement within a day, but took until 2 September to reply to our questions, and only repeated the same press-note claims. They still haven’t explained the basis for deletions, or when the pre-enumeration removals actually began. This is an edited transcript of the video interview that went live on our YouTube channel on September 6, 2026.