UP political battle intensifies over 4 crore 'missing' voters

In this charged-up season of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in many states and Union Territories of the country, Uttar Pradesh has seen an intensifying political battle over “missing voters”. After Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath claimed on Sunday (December 14) that names of four crore electors vanished from the electoral rolls amid the revision, Samajwadi Party (SP) chief and MP Akhilesh Yadav has hit back.

While the chief minister said that between 85 and 90 per cent of the “missing” voters are supporters of the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and tasked party workers to reach out to every voter in their respective booths and areas till the deadline of the revision exercise, which is December 26, Akhilesh targeted the ruling party saying if the CM’s claim is true, it means it was the BJP’s voters who had been indulging in irregularities all along.

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As the SIR procedure continues in UP, the country’s most populous state, the names of those voters who found themselves omitted during the exercise were being re-verified after the Election Commission (EC) extended the deadline by a fortnight. The northern state got the longest extension among the six states for which the decision was taken.

Adityanath's claim comes the day UP gets new BJP chief

Adityanath, who won two consecutive terms in 2017 and 2022 and will seek a hat-trick in 2027, made his allegation that four crore voters were missing at an event in Lucknow where UP’s state BJP received a new president in Union Minister Pankaj Chaudhary.

While cautioning the BJP workers against complacency and asking them to go to the people in light of the alleged discrepancy, Adityanath said, “In January 2025, the voter list of UP consisted of 15.44 crore people. In January 2026, young people who turn 18, will be eligible to vote. So this number should increase. But instead, it has come down to 12 crore.”

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Subsequently, he asked the party leaders and workers to work among the people in the remaining time of the SIR exercise. While claiming that BJP supporters constituted the lion’s share of the “missing” electorate, the CM also alleged irregularities in the electoral lists and the inclusion of Bangladeshi nationals in them. However, as soon as Adityanath claimed that the “missing voters” are supporters of the BJP, Akhilesh quickly seized upon the opportunity to taunt the BJP and explain the electoral arithmetic, triggering a political row.

'BJP voters behind irregularities'

Akhilesh, who is currently an MP from Kannauj, had lost the chief minister’s post in 2017 to Adityanath and failed to wrest it back in 2022.

Mocking Adityanath’s claim in a post on X, the SP supremo explained as many as six meanings of the claim that his rival politician made. In Hindi, he said, “The chief minister of UP himself is saying that among the 4 crore voters who were not included in the voter list during SIR, 85-90 per cent are BJP voters.”

According to Akhilesh, “This means that approximately 3.4 crore BJP voters have been removed from the voter list. The BJP voters were responsible for the irregularities.” He said he took Adityanath's lower estimate of 85 per cent of four crore.

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The former CM also raised the issue of PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak), one of his key electoral strategies, claiming that it was due to the “PDA guards”, the BJP could not manipulate things as they wanted. Explaining the electoral math for the 2027 Assembly elections, Akhilesh also said if one looks at UP’s 403 Assembly constituencies and divides 3.4 crore by that number, the BJP would lose 84,000 votes in each one of them before the next polls. The SP chief called these votes “illegal”.

BJP will out of race in next polls, predicts Akhilesh

According to Akhilesh’s final analysis, the saffron party would be completely out of the race in the next UP elections.

Echoing the SP chief, party spokesperson Fakhrul Hasan Chand said, “The PDA guards are going from street to street, village to village. As a result, the BJP has not been able to play the game to its liking. The BJP calls itself a party of the cities. But the names that have been removed from the voter list indicate that a large number of people who have settled in the cities had registered their names in two places. The SP’s booth-level agents (BLAs) are also scrutinising the removed names to ensure that no fake names remain and that no genuine voter’s name is deleted.”

Congress slams EC

Congress spokesperson Anshu Awasthi asked, “Who are these people with 3-3 or 4-4 votes? These are the people who do not respect the Constitution. Why is the chief minister, while holding a constitutional post, trying to influence the SIR process? He is telling the Election Commission, the reliability of which is already being questioned, who should have voting rights and who should not have. The Congress demands that the EC work impartially. It should not happen that the underprivileged, Dalits, and minorities, who are not BJP voters, are removed.”

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Meanwhile, BJP workers were particularly vigilant about the names of the “missing” voters. Its BLAs were scrutinising the lists of such names at every booth after they received the order from the state’s top leadership.

As of now, the EC is re-verifying the names of these voters after the deadline’s extension. While the deadline for submitting the enumeration forms in the state has been extended till December 26, this controversy over “missing” voters could escalate further before the 2027 elections, something the current allegations and counter-allegations between the government and Opposition forces have suggested.

(This story was first published in The Federal Desh)