New Delhi: In a bid to intensify its agitation against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI’s) ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in Bihar and its proposed plan to carry out the same across all states, the INDIA bloc will organise a 15-day campaign beginning from August 15, 2025. The opposition front plans to cover all the nine commissionerates of Bihar through the fortnight. The rally will culminate in Patna’s Gandhi Maidan, with all the top leaders of INDIA bloc expected to be present at the venue. Communist Party of India (ML-Liberation)’s general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said, “We have found widespread distress and anger among people against SIR in Bihar. That is why our rally is called ‘vote adhikaar yatra’. It will begin in Sasaram on August 15 and will continue until August 30-31. All the INDIA bloc leaders will address a big rally in Patna on September 1.”Bhattacharya lashed out at the ECI, in a way reasserting the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s claim, that the apex poll body is no longer the autonomous and neutral institution that it used to be. “The ECI should be facilitators of the election process, but instead of playing that role, it is playing the role of a political challenger,” the Communist leader said. He said the electoral list that the ECI has released after the first phase of the SIR and which contain around 65 lakh fewer voters after deletions have only created “hurdles” for common people to cross-check its veracity. He said that the ECI has released a completely new list of voters with new booth numbers that makes it nearly impossible for anyone to compare it with the existing voter rolls. “Ideally, the ECI should have marked the deletions in the old voter list for the sake of transparency and convenience of anyone who wanted to cross-check,” one of his political aides elaborated. Bhattacharya said that the booth level officers conducting the SIR on the ground have marked “nearly 10-15%” people as “not recommended” as voters, which is likely to be a huge number and could make the process of objections quite cumbersome, especially for marginalised and poor people. On SIR and Gandhi’s briefing on August 7, 2025, in which he highlighted multiple irregularities in the voter list in the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha constituency as an example of a probable pan-Indian “stealing of votes”, Bhattacharya said that these discrepancies should be checked by the ECI but it has dared Gandhi to come on oath with these allegations. “EC’s approach has been very ‘un-ECI like’. It is demonstrating how the ECI shouldn’t function,” he said. “The ECI has been conducting the SIR in a very negative way. You don’t give data and lists properly; the EC’s mode is to dare people, like catch us if you can,” he said. Responding to the ECI’s response that criticism of opposition parties against it is misplaced as the SIR process was also being monitored by booth-level agents or BLAs of political parties, Bhattacharya said, “People are expecting their voting rights to be guaranteed by the EC, not BLAs.”The INDIA bloc’s rally against SIR will also likely kickstart its electoral campaign in the state. Given that the rally is centred around SIR, the INDIA bloc expects to turn the EC’s exercise, which they believe could lead to “mass disenfranchisement”, into one of the central electoral issues.Bhattacharya said that his party CPI(ML-Liberation) will also hold a separate rally against the SIR to mark the Quit India Movement’s anniversary from August 9-11. The rally is meant to attack the ECI and the BJP as “Chunav Chor, Gaddi Chor” (Election thief, Political Seat’s thief). From August 15 onwards, the INDIA bloc rally expects to touch all districts and a majority of booths taking forward its slogan “Azadi Bachao, Samvidhan Bachao, Loktantra Bachao” (Save Freedom, Save Constitution, Save Democracy).