The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June Election of 2024

The Secretary of the Writers Union Prime Minister’s Office

Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee the message sent out via Nagpur

Stating that the people

Had forfeited the confidence of the government

And could win it back only

By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier

In that case for the government

To dissolve the people

And elect another? – [Courtesy Bertolt Brecht]

The way things are going with the SIR, we are heading for the regime “electing its people” – with the full participation of the Opposition parties, who despite the knowledge of the process, have become unwilling participants. Not knowing how to respond, they seem to be running around like headless chickens. “Vote Chori” and the so-called “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) are closely tied together and though Rahul Gandhi seems to have got the import of what this means, reports suggest that RSS “sleeper cells” within and outside the Congress Party are hyperactive now, trying to undermine the campaign against vote chori. Some INDIA bloc parties have even openly distanced themselves from it.

Before we proceed, let me state some instances from personal experience. In September 2025, soon after Rahul Gandhi’s first press conference on the vote theft issue, I had written in The Quint, citing instances from my own family.

Eighteen days before Rahul Gandhi’s second press conference on the tampering with voters’ lists, my sister who has been a journalist for over thirty-five years now, received a letter from the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO), Assembly Constituency 45, Mehrauli. Dated 29 August 2025, the letter informed her that “it has been reported to the undersigned by the BLO that you are not ordinarily residing at the above address (PERMANENT SHIFTED)…” stating further that therefore, “the undersigned proposes to delete your name from the electoral rolls…” She was directed by the ERO to appear before him at 11 am by 10.09. 2025 at the Voter Registration and Epic Centre or “sent at email (sic): mehrauliac@yahoo.com”. Notice that the email address to which she was supposed to write is not an official government account but a private yahoo address, which itself ought to be a matter of investigation under these circumstances.

It is interesting that in my sister’s case, the pattern was exactly the one mentioned by Rahul Gandhi with regard to the first case that the BLO in Aland stumbled upon. Upon inquiring as to the source of the ARO’s  information regarding her shifting from her residence, she was told that the neighbour had informed the BLO. Meanwhile, she decided to share the information on X (Twitter) tagging the “CeodelhiOffice” along with the additional, startling information that while voting during the 2024 elections, she and her husband (also a journalist of very long standing) had “spotted two extra names on our address”, which they immediately pointed out to the election officers in their booth. Where did these extra names appear from, suddenly after 35 years?

I also learnt from my family members in Dehra Dun that in the 2024 elections, they who had been regularly voting for the last forty years from the same address, suddenly found that there were some changes in information in the voters lists that led to mismatch with that in their voters ID card. Inquiries with friends elsewhere in Dehra Dun revealed that many people across the town had faced a similar problem, leading to their not being allowed to vote.

Returning to the present moment, some residents of Sah-Vikas Apartments in Patparganj, Delhi – including myself – have been put in a list of “unmapped voters” and our names are no longer there in the voters’ list of 2002, although we have been voters for decades – in fact5 since 2022 when the photo ID cards were issued. There are 104 such names of “unmapped voters” of which many are still living in the housing society and have been voting from these same addresses for at least two decades, in every election. This list (with several inaccuracies in flat numbers and names of residents) was shared with the society’s Managing Committee by the Booth Level Officer (BLO) in five handwritten pages of a spiral notebook. Nothing official about it – not even a signature of the BLO or any other official. We simply do not know on what this list is based nor what the strange term “unmapped” means. Upon making inquiries we were told at less than twenty-fours hours’ notice that the BLO would be coming over to the society’s premises on a Sunday afternoon. When some of our friends met the BLO that day, she too had no clue – or seemed not to have – as to what the process of getting “mapped”  was. She said however that those whose names are not to be found in the 2002 records of the ECI  “would have to wait for the government guidelines” on how to be put back into the rolls. Nobody knows when these “guidelines” will arrive or what they will be.

What we do know is that by now about forty BLOs have died since the “SIR” process started – some have committed suicide while others have simply collapsed under the pressure of having to execute something they have no clue about. They have not been trained and they have been asked to meet unachievable deadlines.

We also know now that the “SIR” process as it has been implemented in Bihar (confirmed by the personal information above from Delhi)  is a process of mass disenfranchisement of a sizeable section of the Indian population. Many who are “unmapped” might eventually manage to get themselves back on the rolls but overall, the poorer and more vulnerable – largely Muslims, Dalits and OBCs – will not be able to get back. For one thing, there is no court of appeal, no way of counter-checking what the Election Commission is doing behind the backs of the people. For another, we have also seen that in the evidence provided by Rahul Gandi in his three press conferences, this is not just a process of deletions but also of mass inclusion of bogus voters – a matter on which the ECI has not yet been able to give an answer.

It is now quite clear that overall, the so-called “SIR” process has no constitutional or legal validity,  as Abhishek Singhvi so eloquently argued in the Supreme Court on 27 November 2025. This process is a violation of the law in a number of ways.

The most fundamental change in the process, apart from the various constitutional and legal violations through which this so-called SIR is constituted, is that it completely subverts the fundamental principle of natural justice – that you are innocent until proven guilty and that therefore the onus of proof (of your being a non-citizen) has to be on the state or anyone else who is making the allegation. To invert the process and make the entire population of the country suspect and to shift the onus of proof of bona fide citizenship on it, is essentially a process of the usurpers now disenfranchising the entire people – to constitute a new people of their own liking.

Amit Shah’s maniacal response to Rahul Gandhi in parliament was the response of the thief caught red-handed, now wanting to brazen it out. But more importantly, from the point of view of the argument that I want to make, is that it showed once again that neither the fake ECI nor the government’s top functionaries see themselves as answerable to the people and the parliament anymore. They will simply not respond to any question. Period. Especially where it concerns the daylight robbery on Indian democracy, they will even become violent and lose all sense of propriety. Congress leader Digvijay Singh cited Amit Shah’s statement in parliament that “he had called the CEC the previous night” to inquire if they had received any complaints and the reply he received was that from 2014 to 2025, no complaint had been received by it. This is a blatant lie – whether by the CEC or by Shah we do not know – and is “sustained” by one simple technique: don’t put objections and complaints on record! Singh informed Rajya Sabha that he was tabling the copies of 21 complaints and objections that had been sent to the ECI by his party as well as the Constitutional Conduct Group headed by Justice Madan Lokur – all of which the ECI had refused to acknowledge. They are now there in the proceedings of parliament but only for the benefit of a future historian. Singh also underlined that apart from this whenever the Opposition parties had asked for an appointment to meet the EC, they had simply been denied the time – and that this had been happening from the time the former CEC Rajiv Kumar took charge and has been continuing with Gyanesh Kumar.

The overall terror of the regime has by now made a joke of the judiciary itself – where hearings after hearings yield nothing – but that isn’t the story I want to pursue here.

Now if what I have outlined above is the strategy of the illegitimate regime that rules today, what about the Opposition parties? Their disarray is, of course, well known but that too is tied to the fact that they are now increasingly giving in to the gaslighting by the regime – often trying to convince themselves that things are not really quite as bad as they seem. The still seem to be living under the delusion that they will win the 2029 elections! The statement by Omar Abdullah linked above is an instance.

The fact of the matter is that from the very next day after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, when the usurpers almost lost, the Opposition went into some inexplicable daydreams thinking that now that half the battle had been won, power will fall into their laps in 2029 on its own. What was worse was that the INDIA bloc simply came apart on the very morrow of the elections, while the MoSha regime’s machinery moved rapidly into action. Let me humbly suggest this: “SIR” has been undertaken as a completely opaque process precisely to ensure that by the time the 2029 elections are held, there will only be “the people” who have been “elected” by the regime. If one thinks otherwise, one will only be living in a fool’s paradise. That is why the ECI and its doings have been placed above even above parliamentary oversight.

Let me also point out that this is perfectly in tune with the mode of rule perfected by the ruling duo, which basically revels in creating one crisis after another that will keep the entire country on tenterhooks – leaving no possibility of their ever getting the time or energy to think about politically challenging or resisting the regime. This happened during demonetization. It was the same logic that was repeated with the lockdown at barely four hours’ notice. And it was exactly the same thing that was sought to be repeated with the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.  What is happening now might have begun right then, had not the pandemic intervened. And now we have the so-called SIR. It is as if on each such occasion the duo sits on a perch and throw crumbs that people have to keep running to gather if they must survive.

This time around the game is far more sinister and has also got the political parties running around gathering the crumbs – filling up of “forms” for inclusion in voters’ lists so that their voters do not get deleted. But the rules are already laid out in a way that they cannot win.

So, where do we go from here? How do we deal with the situation? By participating in this daylight robbery – even with the noblest intentions – are the opposition parties not giving legitimacy to this process of the greatest heist on Indian democracy? Remember one more thing. You might still believe that you will raise these matters in parliament but the fact of the matter is that you simply will not be allowed to. You will be forced to debate “Vande Mataram” when you want to debate SIR or vote chori, the gas chamber that the capital has become, unemployment, destruction of education, the falling rupee, the aviation crisis or any other burning issue of the day. And you will, willy nilly, participate in such faux debates as you did this time.

Frankly, this is the time one thinks of a Gandhi and the extreme courage of conviction it took to say that we will not obey an unjust (and unconstitutional) law and face the consequence of such disobedience.