Demonstrations held in New Delhi have drawn together opposition parties, civil society groups, and the Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) to voice objections about voter-name removals under the Election Commission of India's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and what that process may mean for democratic representation. Demonstrations near Parliament, Akashvani Bhawan, and Jantar Mantar drew people into the streets following the dispute, with those areas becoming gathering points for opposing sides.
The INDIA bloc has raised objections over what it describes as compromised electoral integrity, while the CJP has taken on a notable role in pushing for transparency and a fresh look at the process. Voter rolls in Delhi are reported to carry roughly 47 lakh deletions, based on tallies put forward by those taking part in the demonstrations.
Questions about the scope of the reported voter-roll removals have prompted calls from opposition figures and civil society groups for clear explanations, greater transparency in the process, and protective measures to prevent eligible voters from losing access to the ballot. A voter-roll revision exercise run by the Election Commission has drawn political dispute, with some parties raising concerns that certain qualified individuals may be left off the updated register. How the commission handled its process, and what drove each individual deletion, sit at the heart of the ongoing dispute.
Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, both Congress leaders, added their presence to gatherings of opposition MPs pressing for the removal of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a development that drew wider attention to the movement. A push toward the Election Commission's offices took shape as the leaders set out on foot, pressing their calls for accountability and greater openness in the body's operations.
Police barriers redirected the procession away from its planned path, leaving demonstrators and officers facing one another in a standoff near Akashvani Bhawan. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra pressed ahead with their demonstration even as police-imposed curbs remained in place around them. The dispute drew broader notice after opposition figures repositioned it as a question of democratic rights, challenging the characterisation that it was little more than a bureaucratic quarrel over electoral registration.
Arrests of the Gandhi siblings and a number of other opposition figures followed when authorities moved against the protest. Near Akashvani Bhawan, a face-off between protesters and authorities drew attention to the widening rift between the opposition and the Election Commission over the voter roll revision process. Those leaders argued that purging qualified voters from electoral rolls carries direct consequences for how communities are represented in government.
A formal request went to the commission asking it to disclose the grounds on which names had been removed and to put in place an open process allowing those whose entries were struck to contest the decision. Demonstrations carried on well beyond that first flashpoint.
In the days that followed, opposition figures kept up their coordinated push against the authorities, meeting regularly to align their approach and sustain the pressure they had built. According to unverified accounts, leaders affiliated with the INDIA bloc gathered at venues including Sagar Ratna and Moets for a midday meal before resuming their scheduled engagements. Those gatherings gave leaders a forum to align on tactics, consolidate their positions, and weigh ways of keeping pressure on the SIR exercise going forward.
On 10 October, a gathering at Jantar Mantar marked a new stage in the demonstrations, following a call to assemble issued by the CJP. Mobilising public pushback against what it described as the purging of eligible voters from registration rolls stood at the heart of the CJP's declared priorities. Authorities deployed a notable security presence in response to the event organisers' plans for the gathering.
Gatherings at the designated location ran into obstacles after cordons, physical barriers, and pre-emptive arrests were put in place. A number of CJP figures were taken into custody as officials moved to bring the protest under control. Calls for accountability over the reported removal of voters' names from electoral rolls persisted, with both opposition parties and civil society organisations pressing for clear explanations.
Renewed attention to how the Election Commission manages the accuracy and inclusiveness of voter rolls has come from the recent wave of protests. Accurate voter rolls depend on removing duplicate and ineligible records, just as they depend on keeping the path to the ballot open for every person who meets the legal requirements. The underlying difficulty, as framed by those involved in the dispute, centres on keeping procedural updates from placing undue obstacles in the path of those with a legal right to cast a ballot.
Questions about the reported removal of 47 lakh names from Delhi's voter rolls have prompted calls for a thorough examination of both the accuracy of that figure and the grounds on which those entries were struck off. The four-letter code ASDD groups electors into one of four status categories — Absent, Shifted, Dead, or Duplicate — applied when enumerators were unable to gather completed forms from those voters during the Summary Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
Five groupings appear in the breakdown released by Delhi's Chief Electoral Officer: voters recorded as deceased, those who cannot be located or are absent, individuals who have moved away on a lasting basis, names already appearing on rolls elsewhere, and a residual category covering other cases. Where the label ASDDO appears, that extra letter signals the addition of a fifth category not present under the earlier ASD designation.
Among Delhi's total registered voter base of 14,510,299 people, records for roughly two-thirds — 67.2% — had been converted to digital format by the time the draft electoral roll went out on 31 August. Of that total, roughly a third — specifically 32.8 percent — was deemed impossible to recover. Among those cases, roughly two-thirds carried a permanent-relocation status, nearly one in four had no traceable record or had simply vanished from contact, just under six in a hundred had died, and the remaining three in a hundred had already taken up a place in another programme.
Across Delhi's 70 Assembly constituencies, the breakdown of these classifications varies from one seat to the next. Among the assembly constituencies surveyed, Vikaspuri recorded the steepest proportion of voters listed as either absent or impossible to trace, at 56.55%, while New Delhi returned the lowest figure at 9.18%. That one-percent margin of error, where it applies, pertains only to the composition of forms that went uncollected — it offers no indication of how many voters in any particular constituency were absent from the preliminary roll altogether. Having fewer absent voters on the rolls does not automatically translate into a lower total number of removals.
A news report cited by the Internet Freedom Foundation found that somewhere between a third and two-fifths of voters who had been enrolled on the electoral lists ahead of New Delhi's February 2025 assembly elections were subsequently struck from those lists. Among those counted in that group were people living at a facility serving blind residents, whose relocation status had been logged as permanent.
Questions about whether voters labelled untraceable or absent were handled uniformly — and who bears responsibility for those determinations — have drawn scrutiny from observers of the process. The documentation examined contained no Election Commission directive formally establishing or defining that category. Where Booth Level Officers are concerned, a requirement of three or more visits per household has been recorded across other electoral phases, yet no definitive evidence anchors that same standard to Delhi. Inconsistencies in how the rules were applied across different constituencies remain a point of scrutiny, given how far the numbers diverge from one area to the next.
Breakdown by gender reveals that the figures for women and men follow a largely comparable trajectory. Among women, voters who are untraceable or have no recorded address make up roughly a quarter — 24.99% — of forms that cannot be collected, with a nearly identical share of 24.50% recorded for men; the larger portion in both groups, at 66.46% for women and 66.32% for men, belongs to those who have relocated on a lasting basis. For the third-gender category, rates of 36.68% and 59.44% were recorded, though no breakdown of the underlying group's total count was made available.
Patterns in how unrecoverable forms were categorised can be traced through the data, yet whether any given exclusion held up on its own merits remains an open question.
