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What’s going on, Alfie? Oh sorry, wrong generation, but the entitled Gen Z, nourished on Instagram tidbits, should understand. For two weeks, the Capital has been treated to the spectacle of a democracy (apparently) under siege. On October 5, the Congress president listed three “non-negotiable” demands: The resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), the cancellation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, and a return to paper ballots. On October 10, more than 2,000 people were detained in Delhi as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) upped Congress’s demands: That the CEC should resign within 48 hours, that the SIR be frozen, that the rolls be rolled back to January 2025, and, for good measure, that elections be suspended.
Many, including this writer, have criticised the process of the SIR. But the events of the last two weeks make me very pessimistic about the prospects for logic or reform within the political Opposition. I have studied and commented on politics and economics for over 30 years. I have disagreed when facts demanded; more than agreed when the logic was compelling. But never, ever, have I found the opposition voices so lacking in common sense in pursuit of their common minimum programme of regime change. The Opposition has no plot, except protest. Oh sorry, they do have a plot: Protest for the sake of protest. What shall we do today? Demand the resignation of a minister. Tomorrow? Remove the CEC. Day after, elect cockroaches to Parliament. Demands invisible on both logic and substance.
We are now supposed to listen to the most entitled generation in the world, one bereft of all ideas except a supreme arrogance. The CJP website wants the CEC arrested under the anti-terror law if a single legitimate vote is deleted; their case is that votes were “stolen”, backed by not one number.
Too extreme a view, you say? As my readers know, my motto is simple: Give logical evidence, not demands or platitudes. The CJP is short even on platitudes, betraying the fact that the only support they have is the belief that the deep state is behind them, so why bother. So here is the evidence on the SIR. Evidence expanded in an approximately 4,000-word Substack entitled Much Ado about (Almost) Nothing.
The logic and the evidence. Only deal with the known unknowns. First, start with how many adults India has. Carry the last (2011) Census forward with official birth and death rates, correct for the method’s known overshoot, allow for Covid deaths and emigration, and India had about 1,008 million adults in mid-2026. The UN, the SRS and the government’s own Technical Group all land within 1.5 per cent of that number.
Second, remember even though “painful” to the cause, that not every adult registers to vote. In India, registration is voluntary; you fill in Form 6 if you want to vote. The ECI’s own pre-SIR data showed that in the 2024 Lok Sabha election, one in four Indians aged 18 to 29, 73 million young people, were not registered. Add a small allowance for older adults who have never registered, or who dropped off after moving, and about 8.5 per cent of adults are legitimately not on the rolls. That is less than in Britain or the United States, where nobody calls it disenfranchisement. A clean Indian roll, therefore, should hold about 91.5 per cent of adults, about 922 million names, not 1,008 million.
Third, apply that test state by state where the SIR is final: Bihar and the eight large states of phase II. A clean roll for these states, built from each state’s adults less each state’s own non-registration, should hold about 535 million names; the final rolls hold 528 million. Allowing for the legitimate removal of non-citizens, the best estimate is that about 7 million eligible voters (range 1 to 13 million) have been excluded from the rolls without adequate explanation.
Seven million is not nothing to those 7 million. But put it in perspective. It is less than 1 per cent of India’s adults. Of the 58 million names removed in these states, 51 million had to go: The dead, the duplicates, those who had moved away for good. Seven of every eight removals were justified. And rolls have never been accurate to within 1 or 2 per cent. In 2004, after the last nationwide intensive revision, the roll held 4.4 per cent more names than there were adults, 28 million phantom voters. It was 3.1 per cent too high in 2014. There was no march on Nirvachan Sadan, no talk of vote theft, and no allegation that the ECI had doctored the rolls. (Incidentally, Congress, then in opposition, won the 2004 election).
What of the Cockroach-Congress much-mentioned 13 crore? It is the draft-stage figure of 133.7 million, including the known dead. Treating it as a count of the disenfranchised is like treating every patient admitted to hospital as a death.
What of the two states at the centre of the noise? In Bihar, where the outcry began, the final roll still holds about 6 million more names than a clean roll would; and in West Bengal, 6 to 7 per cent of adults (about 5 million eligible citizens) appear to have been removed without adequate explanation; the citizenship-style adjudication fell disproportionately on Muslims in Murshidabad and Malda, and on Matua Hindus.
Could the SIR have been done much better? Obviously. As I pointed out in The Indian Express, (‘I have voted for three decades. Why is my SIR incomplete?’, September 24), the process was hasty, demanded paperwork the poor and the migrant do not keep, and added a new declaration to Form 6 without a change in the rules, a move whose legality the Supreme Court has yet to decide. Those criticisms stand. But criticising the administration of an exercise is very different from claiming that it disenfranchised a seventh of the electorate. The evidence says the ECI has been much more right than wrong.
A serious opposition would demand that the ECI publish removals by reason, state and booth; that the West Bengal appeals be decided quickly; and that phase III rolls be tested against a clean roll when they are final. Those are reforms worth marching for. Instead we have resignations on demand, paper ballots, and cockroaches. It is, to borrow from Macbeth, a tale full of sound and fury, signifying, if not nothing, far less than claimed.
Bhalla is chairperson of the Technical Expert Group for the first official Household Income Survey of India. Views are personal
