Watch SY Quraishi, Author and Former Chief Election Commissioner, in conversation with Kaveree Bamzai, Senior Journalist, at a Odisha Literary Festival (OLF) session titled 'India And I: Evidence of a Democracy in Action.' 'Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is nothing but hijacking of democracy, stated Quraishi. He gave the example of the Bihar SIR over concerns about 'illegal immigrants' on electoral rolls in June 2025, ahead of the state polls in November. The exercise revealed that just about 500 people out of 80 million voters were declared as foreigners, including 350 'Hindu' Nepali women who were married into Indian families.
We have become a police state, Quraishi declared. He questioned the silence of people, including intellectuals, critics, and journalists, over the mass SIR voter deletions across states. However, he agreed that the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests offered a silver lining in removing the fear among Indians, carried out by very young people. 'During my time, the voter enrolment ratio among youth was 12%, so we created National Voters’ Day on the 25th of January, because the Election Commission of India was born a day before India was born as a republic,' said SY Quraishi