‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practice to deceive’ – Walter Scott.The nationwide disaster created by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is likely to ultimately result in more than 15 crore eligible citizens remaining out of the voter lists. The idea of inclusiveness has gone for a toss. The only way to protect the constitutional right to vote of citizens is to scrap the exercise completely.There are at least five major reasons for this crisis: (i) treating 2002-3 lists as sacrosanct; (ii) misapplication of the concept of absentee/shifted; (iii) violation of principles of natural justice (iv) misuse of Form 7 to delete voters and (v) illogical concept of logical discrepancy.The voter lists in 2002-03The 2002–2005 voter lists were filled with errors. The entire idea of creating legacy through faulty voter lists was itself devoid of merit. A lot of people, especially those belonging to marginalised groups, have struggled to find their names on an over two-decade-old list. Treating this list as sacrosanct was a grave error and it has resulted in the exclusion of a large numbers of citizens.The excluded include senior government officers, diplomats, and many others whose names were not on that list simply because they were posted abroad when it was drafted.Absentee or shifted votersSection 20(1A) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, stipulates that a person absenting themselves temporarily from their place of ordinary residence shall not, just for that reason, cease to be ordinarily resident of that place.Also, para 8.3 of the Manual of Electoral Rolls, 2023, states that temporary absence from one’s place of ordinary residence will not deprive them of the qualification of ordinarily resident, if they possess the ability to return and have the intention to return to that place.The maximum number of exclusions during the SIR are due to this reason, most likely because of a misunderstanding of what ordinary residence means vis-à-vis being currently resident at any place. This interpretation is in contradiction to existing legal provisions.Natural justiceMillions of citizens have been deleted from voter lists without assigning any reason to them. They have not been given any notice either – just struck off the rolls.The decision of the Supreme Court in Lal Babu Hussain & others v. Electoral Registration Officer & Others (1995) has been cited by the Election Commission of India itself, in Chapter 29 of its manual. This ruling clarified that Section 22 of the RPA demands that before deleing any name, a notice has to be given. Only in case of death is such a notice not required.The Supreme Court also decided that in case of doubtful citizenship, the person must be informed why a suspicion has arisen with regard to his status so that he may be able to show that the basis for such suspicion is ill-founded.Total absence of any opportunity to be heard before large-scale exclusions from the draft rolls is clearly a violation of principle of natural justice.Misuse of Form 7Blatant misuse of Form 7 to carry out mass-scale, targeted exclusions of eligible voters from the electoral rolls has been highlighted by numerous media reports. For instance, in West Bengal, a van reportedly carrying thousands of Form 7 was intercepted in January 2026.Yet, the most blatant cases were reported from Karnataka, with 91,278 Form 7s filed between June and October 2026. In Uttar Pradesh, 85,854 voters’ names were reportedly deleted without giving them any reason, on en masse requests submitted after the legally mandated deadline for claims and objections to be filed.Logical discrepanciesThe ECI has introduced an entirely new concept of logical discrepancy during the 2026 SIR. Several so-called incongruities like name mismatches, a parent or grandparent’s age gap with a child, a family with more than five or siblings mapped to the same parents, so-called implausible age changes between revisions, siblings born less than nine months apart etc., were flagged through the ECI’s software as a logical discrepancy.None of the logical discrepancies have any intelligible nexus with the objective of voter registration. The law is clear: if there is no rational nexus with the object sought to be achieved, that law is unconstitutional due to arbitrariness.Even if true, most of these so-called logical discrepancies reflect prevalent social realities, poor record-maintenance or simply translation or transliteration errors.These discrepancies should have had no bearing on the eligibility of a person to be included in the voter list.That minorities have borne the brunt of exclusions has also been reported from across India. For instance, West Bengal’s notices concentrated in Muslim-majority districts and 95% of deleted voters in Nandigram are Muslims, though the community comprises only 25% of the population there.What next?The issue is not merely about the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner. It is about the credibility of India being a vibrant democracy that conducts fair elections.To include voters left out in the SIR, ECI’s Press Note of 26 September itself states that for non-SIR period, the original Form 6 will be applicable, as per the Registration of Electors Rules 1960, along with some other measures.Are these measures likely to cover all, or most of, the excluded voters? The answer is NO. after the amendments to the RPA (notification dated December 30, 2021), effective from August 1, 2022, Form 6 is only meant for the inclusion of a person in the voter list for the first time. This is also clear from the applicant’s declaration in Form 6, wherein they must state they are first-time voters.So, voters whose names were deleted in SIR as permanently shifted cannot really apply in Form 6, since they already belonged to a voter list earlier.Considering the enormous number of mistakes made in the SIR, the only way to redeem India’s image as a democracy is to scrap SIR altogether and revert to pre-SIR voting lists.If and when the need is felt to conduct another SIR, there should be meticulous consultations and sufficient time given to conduct the exercise in an orderly – and legal – fashion. Only then will the citizenry’s faith in the democratic process be restored.The current SIR is nothing but National Register of Citizens (NRC) through the back door and with a different label. Conducting NRC in the garb of SIR destroyed the credibility of the Election Commission of India.N.K. Sharma and Sanjay Kumar retired as Director General and Additional Director General, respectively, from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. Siraj Hussain is former Union agriculture secretary.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.