CHENNAI/MADURAI: Total of 77 people, of which 47 are aged within 40, living in a geographical contiguous part of Pallakkapatti, a small hamlet in Tirumangalam constituency, located 30 km away from Madurai, have all mysteriously died in the past one year – if one were to believe the draft rolls released as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
S Mokkaraj, a daily wage worker, and his wife M Ammavasi – among those marked as ‘deceased’ and deleted – are hale and hearty when TNIE visited them. These 77 people were present on the electoral roll of their booth prior to the SIR in a consecutive order from serial numbers 1 to 77. All deleted with a clean, sweeping stroke. The booth saw a total deletion of 128 electors, of which 123 were marked as deceased.
TNIE’s visit to the village found that while a considerable number of those wrongly deleted have submitted Form 6 for inclusion only last week, after one of the villagers found out about the deletions. Many were still unaware about their names getting dropped, said R Panjavarnam, who also got deleted as deceased.
An analysis of the full list of deletions by TNIE found at least 57 instances of a minimum of 50 people in each instance, whose names appeared consecutively on the previous electoral roll, getting deleted with one sweeping stroke.
There were also anomalies like a booth in Madathukulam constituency (Tiruppur), where 205 of the 276 persons deleted were marked as deceased. The rural booth saw 35.6% of its 784 voters getting dropped in the SIR draft roll, and of the 205 marked as dead, 118 were aged 50 or below. Despite such data that look highly suspicious warranting scrutiny, multiple officials at booth, district and state level TNIE spoke to said they did not have the wherewithal to check for such anomalies before the release of the SIR draft rolls in which 97.4 lakh electors were dropped.
In Madathukulam, over 60% of the deleted have now submitted Form 6 for inclusion, an official informed TNIE on Tuesday. However, there are several booths where people who got deleted in such a blanket manner remained unaware about the deletions. Take Bhajanai Koil Second Street in Vadapalani coming under T Nagar constituency for instance. An alarming 802 people were deleted from the booth that included this street. The booth had a total of 1,312 voters before SIR and 753 had voted from the booth in 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
The number of deletions and those voted in 2024 add to 1,555! In the particular street, 332 of 485 had been dropped. Many have not submitted forms for inclusions. Sankar Jayaraman and his wife Tamil Selvi have been marked ‘shifted’ and deleted. Both said they were unaware that the SIR process was even under way.
In a booth in Egmore, 655 of 1,348 electors (48.5%) were deleted, of which 59 appearing consecutively were deleted, with 41 marked as absent, 15 as shifted and 3 as deceased. S Arumugasamy and his wife A Kasiammal, who have been a resident there for 21 years, had submitted the enumeration forms, but both were deleted – one marked as shifted and another as absent. Balaraman was deleted as deceased while his wife Lalitha was deleted as shifted despite the two living there for over five decades. TNIE also found that many who have actually shifted remained on the SIR draft rolls. Many deleted voters were now submitting forms for inclusion, often proactively contacted by officials, who said inadequate time had led to unintended deletions.
Pointing out that several households in the neighbourhood now were concerned about whether they would find a place in the final roll, Arumugasamy said, “The process did not make any sense.”
(With inputs from P Srinivasan @ Tiruppur, Seyamla L @ Chennai)