Illogical reasons: on The Hindu’s investigation of Delhi’s draft rolls

That the ECI’s SIR of electoral rolls has been flawed by design and tuned to exclude genuine electors rather than ensure their full enrolment is now well established. The Hindu ’s investigation of Delhi’s draft rolls and the names that the ECI flagged as “logical discrepancies” shows that the process is not only exclusionary but also insidious. The arbitrary nature of these “discrepancies”, especially those relating to family size, suggests that they were chosen to target communities with higher, though declining, fertility rates, for exclusion. Muslims make up 13.6% of Delhi’s draft rolls — in line with the 2011 Census — but accounted for 20.3% of those flagged for “logical discrepancies”. This number goes up to 30% for those flagged under the five reasons linked to family size.