New Delhi/Varanasi, Nov 2 (IANS) Amid the escalating political battle over deletion of voters under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defended the electoral roll revision exercise on Monday, stating that the exercise was nothing new but an ongoing process since the country’s Independence for maintaining “purity and accuracy” of the voters list.
He also told the scribes that the country has undertaken 10 roll revisions under SIR over the past seven decades, 10 of which were done during Congress regimes, and that the one initiated in 2025 under CEC Gyanesh Kumar was the 12th such exercise.
Addressing a press conference in Varanasi, BJP MP Sambit Patra stated, “The SIR is conducted to maintain cleanliness and accuracy of electoral rolls. This is the 12th SIR. Ten SIR exercises were conducted during Congress rule and two during our government’s tenure.”
Rejecting the Opposition’s objections over deletion of voter names, he said that the cleaning of electoral rolls was a routine exercise, under which names of those who have shifted, died, are absent, or are duplicates are removed from the voters list to ensure that only genuine Indian citizens are eligible to vote and ‘infiltrators’ are removed.
The deletion of over 13 crore voters, under the EC-mandated SIR, from the draft electoral list published recently, has led to fierce face-off between the government and Opposition, with the latter accusing the BJP-led NDA government of manipulating the election process.
Sambit Patra, responding to the charge, stated, “Rahul Gandhi has alleged that 13 crore votes were stolen. If that were truly the case, what would the state of the nation be today? People would have been out on the streets, protesting.”
Patra also mocked the Opposition’s claims of unprecedented gathering of supporters and activists at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan against ‘vote chori’, stating that it was nothing less than a ‘flop show’.
“They had claimed that 10 lakh people would attend the mass protest against SIR, but they could not even gather 20,000 people. More than 50 per cent of the Ramlila Maidan was empty,” the BJP spokesperson said, taking a swipe at the gathering of Opposition leaders, which included Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata Banerjee, Tejashwi Yadav, Farooq Abdullah and others.
–IANS
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