The Congress Working Committee demanded restoration of 130 million deleted voters in the electoral rolls and a halt to the special intensive revision or SIR. It also called for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s resignation.
But the exclusion of millions of voters from draft rolls — Delhi saw a 32.8% decline from the 14,510,299 names on the rolls as on June 2026 — has resulted in public angst and anxiety. The CWC meeting saw the Congress shift its strategy from attacking Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar alone to holding the Prime Minister responsible for the “fraud exercise to destroy democracy of the country. “This is not the game of Gyanesh Kumar. He is only a tool. Whenever dictators lose the confidence of common voters, they will try to find special ways to stay in power. This exercise (SIR) could not happen without the concurrence of Modi and Amit Shah. It was done under clear directions of Gyanesh Kumar’s masters. The PM should have intervened and stopped this. To be sure, HT’s analysis of SIR deletions by constituency has shown no correlation with the outcome; and some of the deletions have been caused by death and migration. Revelations by the Indian Express last week that two election commissioners disagreed with some of the decisions, and that the central database of electors wasn’t accessible to on-ground officers tasked with adding and deleting names, have caused a stir. The Election Commission has since clarified that all decisions have been unanimous, based on the majority, and also modified the SIR process to reduce the inconvenience to voters.
PM should resign as it was his moral responsibility to stop this exercise,” Venugopal said. After a CWC meeting on Tuesday, general secretary KC Venugopal announced a massive agitation at the state and district levels, in coordination with INDIA-bloc allies, and said the party would reach out to all voters whose names have been struck off the list.
Kharge also sought that voters whose names have been removed be fully informed and given an opportunity to appeal, and that political parties be provided with the electoral rolls and relevant data in a simple format and in a timely manner. “The poor bear the brunt of all his flawed policies. During demonetization, the poor stood in queues; with this move to disenfranchise voters, the poor are being pushed out of the queue altogether. I know that the poor possess only one source of power: their vote. This is entirely illegal. Since the form sought details , it is believed that it could cause some problems for first-time voters.
Comparing Modi with former PM Rajiv Gandhi, who lowered the voting age from 21 years to 18, Kharge said, “In contrast, we have Prime Minister Modi, who is so resentful of Gen Z that he has hatched a conspiracy to disenfranchise the youth. He quietly altered the rules regarding ‘Form 6’. His reference is to the SIR declaration that was added on to Form 6 asking applicants for enrolment whether their own name or the names of their parents and grandparents appeared in a previous roll.
Seeking more transparency, Kharge also demanded transparency in the critical data and decisions related to the election process so that no party has grounds to claim that information is being withheld.
In his opening speech, Kharge launched a vitriolic attack against both Prime Minister Modi and Chief Election Commissioner Kumar, calling him a “puppet” of the ruling dispensation. We will not let that be snatched away under any circumstances,” the Congress president said, arguing that vote is the greatest weapon for the poor, Dalits, the deprived, and the exploited sections of society, “Modi ji wants to snatch away this right, but we will not allow it to happen.
