SIR: 'Final' Bihar voter roll still a mystery, leaves Grand Alliance baffled

As the Election Commission (EC) on Tuesday (September 30) published the ‘final’ electoral rolls for poll-bound Bihar, the Opposition’s Grand Alliance, which had launched a blistering tirade against the poll panel’s special intensive revision (SIR) of the voter list, had reasons, in equal measure, to both cheer and be wary.

Though still subject to corrections as per directives of the Supreme Court, the pre-SIR electoral rolls (as on June 24, 2025), which had 7.89 crore voters, now stand pruned down to 7.42 crore, according to the EC.

For the Opposition, this ‘final’ figure is both a mystery and a partial vindication of its sustained criticism of the SIR.

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Grand Alliance leaders claim that the data released by the poll panel prove two things.

Opposition feel vindicated

Opposition leaders such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal’s (RJD) Manoj Jha and the Congress’s Legislative Party leader in Bihar, Shakeel Ahmed, Khan told The Federal that the data released by the EC have “completely exposed the fake propaganda” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over the need to weed out ‘ghuspaithiyas’ (illegal infiltrators) because “nearly all deletions have been attributed by the EC to the three categories of deceased voters, permanently migrated voters and a few lakh duplicate voters (registered in more than one place)... There is no deletion category of illegal residents”.

'Because of our pressure'

Secondly, the fact that the final rolls saw the number of voters enlisted jump from 7.24 crore, as mentioned in the draft rolls published by the EC on August 1 to 7.42 crore on September 30 shows, as per Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation or CPI-MLL MP Raja Ram Singh, that the “Opposition and civil society’s claims about the SIR being done in an unscientific, arbitrary and politically motivated manner to disenfranchise our voters were justified because had we not campaigned against it and taken the matter to the Supreme Court, the number of deleted voters would have remained 65 lakh as it was when the draft roll was published or could have been even higher.... because of our pressure, I think at least 10 to 15 lakh people who had been deleted were brought back on the list”.

Still there are reasons to worry

Yet, the Grand Alliance believes there is reason for its leaders and workers alike to “remain vigilant and analyse the final voter list”. According to the Opposition, though the fresh electoral rolls “seem to have rectified some of the flaws present in the draft rolls”, they also raise a new set of disturbing questions.

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“The list was just published yesterday, so we need to analyse it minutely before giving a detailed response, but if we go just by the broad figures of total voters, total additions and total deletions, there are still disturbing questions about the exercise,” said Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Ram.

'Poll panel hasn't given break-up'

While asserting that the Congress, along with its Grand Alliance partners and civil society activists, will “scrutinise the final list closely after the Dussehra celebrations (on October 2) are over”, Ram said, “The poll panel has not given any clear break-up of how many of the 21.53 lakh voters added to the list (after the publication of the draft rolls) are actually fresh voters and how many are those who had been wrongly deleted in the draft rolls and have been reinstated now.”

There is also a mystery around the 3.66 lakh voters who, as per the EC data, were declared “ineligible” by the poll panel after being initially found eligible during the preparation of the draft rolls.

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Yogendra Yadav points out 'serious concerns'

Likewise, as per activist Yogendra Yadav, who was among the petitioners against the SIR in the Supreme Court, there are “serious concerns” on the total figure of 21.53 lakh voters that were added in the draft list through the submission of Form 6.

“According to the EC, the number of Form 6 applications (for voter addition) received by September 1 was 16.93 lakh. The EC had said that after September 1, it will not accept fresh Form 6, but the final voter list published on September 30 says 21.53 lakh voters have been added through Form 6. So, the obvious question to ask is that if the EC was accepting fresh Form 6 (applications) only till September 1, then where did these extra 4.6 lakh voters come from, because on September 1, you (EC) said the figure was 16.93 lakh. This needs to be examined very closely and the EC must come clean,” Yadav said.

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Opposition ponder next move

For the Opposition, the other complication that the publication of the final rolls has created is in preparing its narrative, henceforth, on the SIR. The Grand Alliance had successfully equated the SIR with its “vote chori” (vote theft) pitch against the ruling BJP-led National Democratic Alliance combine and launched a campaign that found palpable resonance on the ground in Bihar.

Now, with the electoral rolls showing a bump in the voter tally compared to the draft rolls, Grand Alliance leaders The Federal spoke to said they need to “figure out” whether to simply project the upward revision as their victory against the SIR and repurpose their campaign against more pressing livelihood issues of Bihar or continue their combined assault against the “BJP-EC conspiracy to disenfranchise Opposition’s voters”.

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"We need to be measured in formulating our response to the final voter list. We don’t know yet whether all 21.53 lakh ‘new voters’ added to the list are actually first-time voters, or if a bulk of them are those who were deleted in the draft rolls or if there are ghost voters who have also been added under the garb of correcting the mistakes of the draft rolls. So, we can’t go overboard claiming victory and vindication," said the Congress’s Kishanganj MP Mohammed Jawed.

"There is still a need to be vigilant; our booth-level agents (BLAs) have to go through the fresh list and see if there is any mischief, and they still have to continue looking for our voters who may have been wrongly deleted and help them file their claims because the Supreme Court had said rectification can be made even after the final list is published. The ‘vote chori-SIR’ campaign has struck a chord with our voters and we shouldn’t just squander that away because a few lakh deleted voters have possibly been reinstated,” he added.

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Sources in the Opposition said the EC was yet to provide them “more granular information about categories of deletions and additions or even the digital (not to be confused with machine-readable) voter lists” and added that “any meaningful scrutiny of the final list will be impossible without all of this being provided to us”.

Congress and RJD leaders told The Federal that their BLAs had already been instructed to get “all relevant details” from the district administration and poll officials in their respective areas and “verify these individually once the Dussehra festivities are over”.