Civil rights groups in Rajasthan have demanded extension of the timeline for Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls by at least six months and removal of exclusionary conditions in the exercise. A public hearing for the people facing difficulties in the SIR process was organised in Jaipur on Thursday (November 27, 2025).
The testimonies placed before a panel during the public hearing showed that the people were facing difficulties in filling up and submission of SIR forms, the SIR was being used as a tool to evict vulnerable people from their homes, and the Booth Level Officers (BLOs) were cancelling forms for lack of access to the 2002 voters’ lists.
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Former Chief Electoral Officer Sudhir Verma presided over the panel. The panellists included former civil servants Meenakshi Hooja, Alka Kala, and Rajendra Bhanawat, former Rajasthan Administrative Service officer Shaukat Ali, Bharat Jodo Abhiyan’s national secretary Kamayani Swami, and People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL)-Rajasthan president Bhanwar Meghwanshi.
About 200 participants from Dungarpur, Udaipur, Banswara, Beawar, Sirohi, Bhilwara, Ajmer, Alwar, Jaipur, Tonk and Rajsamand districts placed their testimonies before the panel. The verbal accounts of people showed that large-scale voter exclusion was taking place during the SIR, which had virtually become an “exercise in disenfranchisement”.
A large number of voters who will lose their voting rights are from tribal areas in southern Rajasthan, where nearly 56% of people migrate to other States for work and are unable to meet the BLOs. At several places, the migrant labour colonies and Muslim-majority areas were facing mass deletion of names, according to the witnesses.
Mr. Meghwanshi said the current design of SIR was not to enrol voters but to exclude them from the electoral rolls, contrary to Article 326 of the Constitution. “The Supreme Court has clearly stated in Lal Babu Hussain vs. ECI judgment of 1992 that the Election Commission cannot determine the citizenship of an Indian citizen. Yet this process has effectively become a means of citizenship verification,” he said.
The requirement to prove the existence of names in the 2002 voters’ list may lead to loss of voting rights for the women who change their names after marriage, denotified and nomadic tribes, transgender persons, deserted and single women, sex workers, and migrant workers from other States.
The panellists said the Aadhaar should be accepted as a full and valid document and voter cards issued in 1995 should be considered valid. The draft voters’ lists should be pasted publicly and a proper social audit process should begin from December 9, a resolution adopted on the conclusion of public hearing stated, while calling upon the Election Commission to make the SIR process inclusive.
Published – November 29, 2025 05:10 am IST
