After Row Over SIR, Election Commission Launches Credibility Offensive

The Election Commission is mounting a public outreach and image-building campaign months after the political fracas over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), unveiling new digital initiatives, promising to revive voter awareness programmes in educational institutions and holding its first-ever nationwide media conference attended by more than 350 journalists.The outreach comes at a time when the Commission is battling perhaps the biggest credibility challenge in its recent history. The SIR exercise, which the poll body has described as a routine effort to clean electoral rolls, has triggered sustained attacks from Opposition parties that have accused it of facilitating arbitrary deletions of voters and imposing burdensome documentation requirements. The exercise has sparked protests, legal challenges and an intense political debate over the Commission's neutrality.