SIR Row: Congress Calls Voter Deletions ‘Shah Instigated Removal’, Flags 7.8 Cr Names

On Sunday, Congress said it was alarmed by what it described as large-scale deletions from electoral rolls in the Election Commission’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The party said millions of names were being removed or checked across states.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the Election Commission of India (ECI) launched Phase 1 of the SIR process in Bihar in June 2025 and then moved to Phase 2 in November 2025 across nine states and three Union Territories (UTs). Ramesh added, 7.8 crore voter names were deleted during Phases 1 and 2, and that the deletions made up 13% of the pre-SIR electoral roll. He also said Phase 3 started in 16 states and three UTs in mid-2026.

As per Ramesh, based on data from 12 states and two UTs, 6.18 crore of the 36.06 crore voters covered in the ongoing phase had had their names deleted. “The deletion rate works out to over 17% 2. An additional 5.43 crore voters have been issued notices demanding additional documentation to have their names retained on the electoral roll. The risk of deletion rate works to another 15%. This is an unusually high proportion that reflects structural flaws in the entire SIR process,” Ramesh said.

He asked how so many voters could still be required to go through verification after deletions had already happened. “Thus, a staggering 32% (or about one in three) of voters have had their names deleted or face risk of deletion.”

State-Wise Deletion Rates

Ramesh listed the state-wise deletion rates as follows: Delhi 53.73%, Chandigarh 52.58%, Jharkhand 39.57%, Uttarakhand 35.71%, Meghalaya 35.36%, Maharashtra 33.88%, Telangana 48.90%, Karnataka 27.6%, Haryana 37.5%, Odisha 23.67%, Andhra Pradesh 21.17% and Punjab 15.23%.

He said the list of voters facing the risk of deletion in Karnataka, Telangana and Jharkhand had been made public so voters could check their names. Delhi, he added, put its list online only on September 19, 2026, and only after public pressure, while other BJP-ruled states and Punjab had not done so yet.

Ramesh said there was abundant evidence that voters from economically and socially disadvantaged sections had been disproportionately affected. He also said that in most major states, more women than men had been removed from the rolls during the SIR.

“With this SIR, the state has abdicated its responsibility and shifted the burden onto citizens to produce documents it may never have provided them,” Ramesh said. He added that a test the overwhelming majority of citizens could not pass was a “machine for exclusion”.

“SIR is actually a massive Shah Instigated Removal of voters. It is an assault on our Constitution,” the Congress general secretary said, in an apparent reference to Union Home Minister Amit Shah.

Tagging his statement on X, Ramesh wrote, “SIR is actually a Shah Instigated Removal of voters on a massive scale. Here is a statement on this brazen assault on our Constitution itself.”

In Delhi, more than 3.16 million voters, including Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief Arvind Kejriwal, were issued notices over “discrepancies” after the SIR of electoral rolls, according to officials involved in the exercise.

The Delhi Chief Electoral Officer’s office published the list of electors served notices late on Friday, nearly three weeks after the draft electoral roll was released on August 31. Voters flagged in the exercise must now submit responses and supporting documents to election authorities if they want their names included in the final roll.

Officials divided the electors into two categories, “no mapping” and “logical discrepancies”. The first refers to voters who could not be linked to the electoral roll from the previous revision in 2002. The second covers entries that did not match the earlier roll. Of the 9,753,577 electors in Delhi’s draft electoral roll after the SIR, 1,379,785 were placed in the “no mapping” category, while 1,933,134 were flagged for “logical discrepancies”.