‘Only one name remains’: Rahul Gandhi visits Bela Estate over SIR deletions

• Rahul Gandhi visits Bela Estate, meets residents whose names were excluded from electoral roll following SIR.

• Gandhi said 727 of 728 people living in the settlement had lost their names from the voter list and questioned the SDM over deletions.

• Episode follows exclusion of electors in Bela Estate polling part; residents say they continue to live there, election officials attribute deletions to changes in area's residential status.

Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi on Monday, 28 September visited Bela Estate along the Yamuna in Delhi and met residents who allege that their names were removed from the electoral roll during the special intensive revision (SIR).

Gandhi heard the residents' grievances and also spoke to a sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) over the phone, questioning the basis for the deletion of their names. In a video shared on social media, he said 728 people currently lived in Bela Estate but only one name remained on the voter list after the SIR, with the other 727 deleted.

"728 people live in Bela Estate on the banks of the Yamuna. After SIR, only one name remains in the voter list — the other 727 names have been struck off," Gandhi said.

He claimed that the residents had been living in the area for decades and had voted in the 2024 Lok Sabha and 2025 Delhi Assembly elections. Their homes were demolished in 2023, he said, but the residents continued to live in the area. "Today I went to their slum and heard directly from them what the Election Commission has done to them," Gandhi said.

During his conversation with the SDM, Gandhi questioned whether the absence of a formal house could be used as a basis for denying someone the right to vote. Referring to the Election Commission's own provision of 'house number 0' for homeless voters, he asked why the names of the Bela Estate residents had been deleted.

"Having a house or not has no connection to the right to vote. CEC Gyanesh Kumar himself has said 'house number 0' is for the homeless. Yet, 727 people's names have been struck off," Gandhi said.

He described the alleged deletions as 'vote theft' and said they amounted to taking away the only political power available to some of the country's poorest citizens. "Vote theft is snatching away the rights of the poor. It is erasing identities, crushing voices," Gandhi said in another post.

He also targeted chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, saying, "Gyanesh Kumar will go. But the system that made him do this will also have to answer."

What happened in Bela Estate

The Bela Estate controversy emerged after the draft electoral roll prepared under Delhi's SIR was published on 31 August. The polling part covering the jhuggi-jhopdi settlement had 729 electors before the revision, but only one name appeared in the draft roll — leaving 728 excluded. National Herald reported earlier this month that residents had been trying to establish why their names were marked as 'shifted' despite continuing to live in the area.

Residents told National Herald that they had lived in the area for decades and had voted in previous elections. Some said they had filled in and submitted SIR enumeration forms but nevertheless found their names missing from the draft roll.

Election officials, however, have said the exclusions followed changes in the area's physical and residential status. According to the office of the electoral registration officer, the earlier roll recorded many addresses simply as 'agriculture', while dwelling units in the area had been demolished in 2022-23. The officials said the deletions included voters classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate.

Residents have disputed the classification, saying they did not leave the area and instead continued living in makeshift shelters nearby after their earlier homes were demolished. Reports have also noted that the largest category among the excluded voters was 'shifted', with 632 names in that category.

Gandhi's visit came amid a wider Opposition campaign against the Election Commission over the SIR following disclosures of dissent within the Commission from two election commissioners over the electoral-roll revision. His intervention at Bela Estate puts the focus on one settlement where the scale of exclusions — 728 out of 729 electors in the draft roll — has become a flashpoint in that larger political dispute.