Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s public claim that 1.27 crore Hindu voters are missing from the state’s electoral rolls following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was part of a “deep conspiracy” to bring in people from other states to register them as voters in the poll-bound state, Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav alleged on Friday.On the same day, the ruling BJP conducted a special workshop as part of its “Matdata Jodo Abhiyan” (Voter Enrolment Campaign) in which party workers and leaders were instructed to launch a drive on a war footing starting November 19, aimed at ensuring every eligible voter is added to the electoral roll while ineligible individuals are removed.Commenting on the BJP’s workshop and Adityanath’s assertions regarding 1.27 crore missing Hindu voters, Yadav alleged that the chief minister had made the statement after careful calculation as part of a deliberate plot aimed at “spreading fear” in society and crafting a narrative to give the BJP an electoral edge.“If it is true that 1.27 crore Hindu voters are missing, that is precisely why this meeting [the BJP workshop] is taking place. The BJP is making preparations regarding those ‘shifting’ votes – votes that were deleted due to people relocating to Delhi or elsewhere, or instances where fraudulent names had been added,” Yadav said.“The BJP is now orchestrating a plan involving unregistered and underground individuals – bringing in people from Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and other states as well, in order to get them registered as voters. That is what the BJP is preparing for,” he said.Speaking at the BJP’s state executive meeting in Lucknow recently, Adityanath claimed that an analysis of the electoral rolls revealed that as many as 1.27 crore Hindu voters were missing and needed to be enrolled through a concerted campaign. He repeated the claim in an interview with the Hindi news channel Aaj Tak, adding that the BJP had submitted a memorandum to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on the matter.Adityanath also flagged discrepancies between the voter lists for panchayat elections and Assembly elections, claiming that over 55 lakh beneficiaries of government welfare schemes were not enrolled as voters and around 4.5 lakh youth in the 18–19 age group were eligible to be added to the rolls.The source of Adityanath’s figures remains unknown and the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Uttar Pradesh has neither explained nor clarified them. Interestingly, other senior BJP leaders have not openly spoken about the claim.“It’s a mystery how he obtained this information from the EC,” Yadav said. “How did he know that 1.27 crore Hindus were deleted? If we were to make a similar claim, we could say 90% of the PDA (Pichda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) vote was deleted.”Also read: In Uttar Pradesh, Young Voters Bear the Biggest Brunt of SIR NoticesOn November 12, the SP submitted a formal memorandum to Uttar Pradesh CEO Navdeep Rinwa, demanding that the ECI take cognisance of Adityanath’s statement, issue him a notice, and seek an affidavit explaining the basis of his claim regarding 1.27 crore missing Hindu voters.SP state president Shyam Lal Pal pointed out that following allegations of voter-list irregularities after the 2022 Assembly election, the ECI had issued a notice to Yadav seeking an explanation. In that notice, Pal noted in his memorandum, the Commission had explicitly stated that electoral rolls are not prepared on the basis of religion or caste. Pal asked why the ECI was quiet on Adityanath’s claims.Meanwhile, Chief Minister Adityanath, BJP state president and MP Pankaj Chaudhary, and Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya addressed the party’s state-level workshop on the voter enrolment campaign. Chaudhary stated that the BJP was launching a month-long drive because it was the duty of party workers – as members of the BJP and active participants in public and political life – to ensure no eligible citizen’s name is left off the electoral roll, even though maintaining that this was ECI’s mandate.Party sources said BJP workers were instructed to play a proactive role in identifying and rectifying discrepancies in the electoral rolls rather than merely focusing on new additions. Particular emphasis is to be placed on women and young voters turning 18 on or before January 1, 2027. Workers have also been tasked with identifying women whose names were deleted from the electoral rolls at their parental homes after marriage but who failed to register at their new marital residences.Party cadres were instructed to reach out to migrant workers and labourers – both across different districts within Uttar Pradesh and outside the state – to ensure their names are added if missing. Workers and leaders were directed to familiarise themselves thoroughly with Forms 6, 7, and 8, which are used for the inclusion of names, deletion of entries, and transfers or corrections, respectively.Speaking to reporters, Chaudhary said the party’s primary concern was ensuring that no foreign national ends up on the voter list, expressing confidence that following the ECI’s Special Summary Revision (SSR) drive, the names of “foreign infiltrators” who have “managed to become citizens of the country” would be purged from the rolls.This echoes the BJP’s broader strategy of invoking the scare of “Bangladeshi infiltrators” and other foreigners – widely viewed as coded references to Muslims – to defend both the voter-list revision process and the credibility of the ECI, which has faced mounting scrutiny.Also read: Significant Net Addition, Cloud Over Appeals: Five Points Emerge From the Uttar Pradesh SIR’s Final FiguresThe BJP’s workshop was attended by regional presidents, regional in-charges, district presidents, district in-charges, and party functionaries overseeing electoral management at the Assembly constituency level.Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya asserted that the party was making every possible effort to ensure that voters who were left-out were enrolled. “We are fully confident that no individual who, from a constitutional perspective, has the right to be a voter will remain unregistered. Every single worker of the BJP is working with complete dedication toward this goal,” Maurya said.Yadav, meanwhile, alleged that the BJP was also plotting to create discrepancies between the electoral rolls used inside polling booths on election day and those available outside. “The BJP is conspiring in a manner that once a voter enters a polling booth on election day, they might be turned away on the pretext that their vote isn’t registered there – forcing them to go searching for it elsewhere,” Yadav claimed.According to the ECI, the integrated draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh will be published on November 17. The window for filing claims and objections – for the inclusion, deletion, or correction of entries – will run from November 17 to December 16. The final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on January 4, 2027, likely just days before the Assembly election schedule is announced.The Uttar Pradesh CEO recently stated that the Election Commission is working in collaboration with multiple state departments to ensure the inclusion of all eligible citizens, particularly women and young voters, currently missing from Assembly constituency rolls.Noting that the proportion of female voters in the current draft remains disproportionately low compared to male voters, the EC has directed all District Election Officers to enlist government agencies – including the Department of Women and Child Development, the Health Department, Anganwadi workers, ASHA workers, Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), and Samuh Sakhis (community group facilitators) under the Uttar Pradesh State Rural Livelihood Mission – to facilitate the registration of eligible women.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.