BENGALURU (The Thursday Times) — Nearly 10 million names have been struck off the electoral roll in India’s Karnataka state, about one in six voters, after a revision of the rolls that opposition parties say is being used to disenfranchise genuine voters across the country.
The final roll published on Tuesday lists 45.5 million voters, down from 55.4 million before the special intensive revision, or SIR, began, a fall of 9.93 million or about 17.9 per cent, according to the state’s chief electoral officer. About 860,000 names were put back at the final stage, after the draft roll in August had left out more than 10 million people.
At the draft stage, officials marked 6.54 million voters as having permanently moved, 1.23 million as dead, 1.51 million as absent and 700,000 as duplicate entries. The heaviest deletions were in Bengaluru’s urban districts. More than 4.35 million notices were sent to voters whose forms had anomalies or could not be matched to earlier records. The Hindu reported that poll officials had sought the deletion of 61,000 voters without giving reasons.
A national row
Karnataka is one of 19 states and union territories in the third phase of the exercise, which began in Bihar in 2025. India’s Supreme Court upheld the revision in May but said it did not give the Election Commission power to decide who is an Indian citizen. Scroll reported that some states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party have nonetheless used the revision to deny ration cards to people removed from the rolls, and that police have in some cases refused to clear passport renewals.
Protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar have been held across India since October 2. On the day Karnataka’s roll was published, the Supreme Court gave petitioners 10 days to respond to the Election Commission in cases that question Kumar’s conduct, seek an investigation into him and ask for the nationwide revision to be declared illegal. The commission has also refused to name the software it used to flag errors in the rolls, citing trade secrets, according to a report cited by Scroll.
The opposition INDIA bloc plans a “public impeachment” of Kumar on October 30, and the Congress party has accused authorities of putting hurdles in its way.
