Is SIR ethnic cleansing for a customised voter roll? | In Focus podcast
This podcast episode discusses concerns regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in India, which has led to the deletion of millions of names. It highlights internal dissent within the Election Commission regarding the centralization of voter databases.
Why it matters
The integrity of electoral rolls is fundamental to democratic processes, and allegations of mass deletions raise significant questions about institutional independence.
From the beginning, civil society and section of political parties have questioned an exercise of such enormous scale, one that was presented as an effort to clean up the electoral rolls and identify suspected foreign nationals, but has already led to more than 13 crore names being deleted at the draft stage.
Those concerns have now moved beyond the SIR, into the functioning of the Election Commission. A recent investigation report found that two of the three Election Commissioners raised formal objections 14 times in 10 months over decisions relating to electoral rolls and SIR, including the centralisation of the voter database.
What do these objections reveal about the way SIR is being conducted, and about the institution overseeing it?
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