NEW DELHI: The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ list commenced on Tuesday across nine states and three Union Territories, with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) dubbing the exercise a “con job” by what it alleged to be a “compromised” poll body.
The electoral roll cleanup exercise has also drawn opposition from the ruling DMK and its allies in Tamil Nadu.
According to the Election Commission (EC), its booth-level officers (BLOs) have begun visiting households to distribute semi-filled enumeration forms to electors and assist them in completing the required documents.
As per the schedule announced by the poll authority, the SIR will begin with the enumeration stage and continue until 4 December. The EC will release the draft electoral rolls on 9 December, while the final rolls are scheduled to be published on 7 February.
The 12 states and Union Territories where this second round of SIR will be conducted are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.
Among these, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Kerala and West Bengal are slated to go to polls in 2026.
In Assam, another state where elections are due in 2026, the revision of electoral rolls will be announced separately as a Supreme Court-supervised exercise to verify citizenship is currently underway. A separate provision of the Citizenship Act also applies to the state.
After Bihar, this marks the second round of the SIR. The final voter list in Bihar, containing nearly 7.42 crore names, was published on 30 September.
The SIR began in West Bengal amid heightened political tensions surrounding the exercise in the state. It has evolved into a political battleground, pitting the BJP’s call for “transparency” and the EC’s administrative efforts against the TMC’s grassroots-level opposition ahead of the 2026 Assembly polls.
While the BJP has welcomed the SIR as a step towards ensuring greater transparency in the electoral rolls, the ruling TMC has questioned its timing and intent, alleging that the EC is acting under pressure from the saffron party to manipulate the voter list ahead of next year’s state elections.
With both parties viewing the SIR as a precursor to the 2026 Assembly elections, the contest has turned into what many in political circles describe as “the battle of two forces — the administrative and the organisational.”
TMC leader Derek O’Brien termed the SIR exercise a “con job organised by the Extremely Compromised body.”
Separately, the DMK, in its plea before the Supreme Court challenging the SIR, described it as a “de facto NRC” and questioned its constitutional validity. The ruling party in Tamil Nadu has sought to quash the EC’s notification on the SIR dated 27 October 2025.
However, the main opposition, AIADMK — an ally of the BJP — has expressed its support for the exercise.
In Uttar Pradesh, the drive was launched under the theme ‘Shuddh Nirvachak Namavali – Majboot Loktantra’ (Clean Electoral Roll – Strong Democracy).
