Rahul Gandhi terms SIR ‘imposed tyranny’ as 16 BLOs die amid voter roll chaos

Launching a searing attack on the Election Commission of India (ECI), Congress leader and Lok Sabha leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has condemned the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as “imposed oppression,” saying the process is already stained by a tragic loss of lives.

Sixteen booth level officers (BLOs) have died in just under three weeks. Heart attacks, crushing stress, and despair-driven suicides have marked this grim toll, with Rahul Gandhi alleging that the ECI’s frantic, paper-laden exercise is a “deliberate ploy” crafted to weary citizens and clear the path for voter fraud.

According to Rahul Gandhi, the SIR is no mere bureaucratic misstep but a “deliberate ploy” — a labyrinth of paperwork designed to torment citizens and open the floodgates to voter fraud. “Under the guise of SIR, chaos has been unleashed across the country. The result? Sixteen BLOs have lost their lives in three weeks. Heart attacks, stress, suicides—SIR is no reform, it's an imposed tyranny,” he wrote on X, sharing a newspaper clipping chronicling the rising fatalities.

He condemned the ECI for compelling voters to comb through “thousands of scanned pages of a 22-year-old voter list”, a task he said was crafted to exhaust genuine voters while allowing vote chori to flourish unchecked.

The SIR — intended to cleanse electoral rolls by striking off duplicate, deceased, and migrated voters ahead of the 2026 assembly polls in states including West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry — extends across nine states and three Union Territories, among them Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Lakshadweep. Phase I has already concluded in Bihar, with the final voter rolls expected on 7 February 2026.

Yet dissenting voices warn that the ECI’s rigid 30-day deadline borders on the impossible. Underpaid and often inadequately trained BLOs — teachers, anganwadi workers, and community volunteers — have been left to shoulder a Herculean task: digitising millions of entries by hand, with little respite and fewer resources.

Rahul Gandhi contrasted India’s celebrated technological mastery with what he described as the commission’s “jungle of paperwork”, urging a transition to digital, searchable, machine-readable electoral lists worthy of a modern democracy.

“If intentions were pure, the ECI would value accountability over this frantic haste,” he said, lamenting that BLOs were being reduced to “collateral damage” in what he called a conspiracy to “sacrifice democracy at the altar of power.”

“This is not incompetence,” he declared. “This is a plot.”

A plot, he vowed, that Congress would resist in its battle to safeguard electoral integrity.

With IANS inputs