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New Delhi, Nov 23 (IANS) In a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI), Congress leader and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has termed the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as “not a reform but an imposed oppression”, directly linking it to the deaths of 16 Booth Level Officers (BLOs) in nearly three weeks.
Heart attacks, severe stress and suicides have taken the lives of these people, with Rahul Gandhi alleging that the ECI’s rushed, paperwork-heavy process is a “deliberate ploy” to harass citizens and enable voter fraud.
“Under the guise of SIR, anarchy has spread across the country – the result? In three weeks, 16 BLOs have lost their lives. Heart attacks, stress, suicide – SIR is not a reform, it is an imposed tyranny,” he wrote in a post on Twitter.
He accused the Election Commission of forcing voters to sift through “thousands of scanned pages of a 22-year-old voter list” to find their names, which was designed to “exhaust genuine voters and allow vote theft to continue unabated”.
SIR, which aims to clean the electoral rolls by removing duplicate, dead and transferred voters ahead of the 2026 assembly elections in states like West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, is operational in nine states and three Union Territories, including Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Lakshadweep.
Phase-I of SIR concluded in Bihar with the final voter list on February 7, 2026.
Nevertheless, critics have condemned the 30-day deadline as unrealistic, burdening underpaid, often untrained BLOs – mostly teachers, Anganwadi workers and volunteers – with manually digitizing millions of entries.
The Congress leader compared India’s global software prowess to the ECI’s “forest of paperwork”, and urged a shift to “digital, searchable, machine-readable” lists for true transparency.
“Had intentions been pure, the ECI would have prioritized accountability over this haste,” he said, calling the BLO deaths “collateral damage” in a “conspiracy to sacrifice democracy for power.”
Ensuring Congress fights for election integrity, he concluded, “This is not a failure – this is a conspiracy.”
–IANS
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