Black balloons bearing the Hindi-language slogan "Vote Chor, Gaddi Chhod" were raised over Ambedkar Park in Farrukhnagar on Saturday, as Congress party members brought their protest over alleged voter roll deletions onto the streets. At a rally held in Baharli Basti under the "Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao" slogan, party members put forward questions about the manner in which the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was being carried out, and pressed for a response to accounts of voter names disappearing from the lists.
Sanjay Dutt, serving as the Congress party's AICC in-charge for Haryana, alleged that voter rolls had been manipulated to remove between 13 and 14 crore names nationwide, adding that those whose political leanings ran counter to the BJP appeared to have been disproportionately affected by the deletions. No independent means of confirming either the figures or the allegations was available at the time of reporting.
Rao Narendra Singh, who heads the Haryana Congress, put forward the position that genuine democratic participation extends beyond the act of conducting elections, insisting that no eligible voter should face barriers when attempting to cast a ballot. Inflation, unemployment, and what he characterised as efforts to undermine constitutional bodies also featured in his remarks.
Addressing the hurdles voters encounter when attempting to correct mistakes on electoral rolls, Singh raised the question of whether people with limited means have a realistic path to having such complaints heard. He called for a complaints-handling procedure built around transparency, reasonable accessibility, and a clear timeframe for resolution.
Tanwar, who once held the top post within Haryana's Congress organisation, alleged that voter rolls across the state had been stripped of a substantial number of entries, and urged the public to unite in protecting their right to vote. Voting rights, he argued, form the foundation through which citizens engage with democratic life.
Vardhan Yadav, who heads the rural Congress unit in Gurgaon, put forward a figure of approximately 1.76 lakh voter entries removed from the Badshapur assembly rolls during the Special Intensive Revision process, and raised questions about how deletions on that scale could have taken place. In attributed remarks, he further contended that a Congress representative would be sitting in the assembly today had every eligible voter's registration been upheld and the contest conducted on an equal footing, adding that the minister's victory owed more to procedural irregularities than to voter preference. No proof linking the minister to improper deletions was put before the gathering, and the claim itself went unverified throughout the proceedings.
Protesters converged around two shared demands: a review of discrepancies found in voter registration data, and assurance that no eligible person would be turned away at the polls. The allegations put forward by Congress leaders — pointing to mass removals from voter rolls and targeted political interference — had not been cross-checked against official electoral data at the time of reporting.
A voter-roll update tied to Haryana's Special Intensive Revision process trimmed the Gurgaon district electorate by 4,53,079 names when the pre-SIR list was set against the draft roll that followed. Voter rolls in the district contracted from 15,55,034 registered names to 11,01,955 — a reduction of roughly 29 per cent.
Deletion tallies across the four assembly segments varied by constituency: Badshapur shed 1,75,878 voter entries, Gurgaon shed 1,78,990, while the figures for Sohna and Pataudi stood at 57,908 and 40,303 respectively. Figures compiled during the enumeration exercise flag voters under four categories — absent, relocated, deceased, or recorded more than once — yet omission from that preliminary list carries no automatic determination of a person's voting ineligibility.
