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New Delhi: If the entire population of any one state of the country gets removed from the voter list overnight, then it does not remain just an administrative figure. In the current exercise of Special Intensive Revision of Voters List i.e. SIR, about 11.83 crore names have been deleted so far, which is equal to about 12.1 percent of the total registered voters of the country. For comparison, understand that in the Brazilian general elections held in 2022, not even that many votes were cast, and keeping India and China aside, there are only fourteen countries left in the world whose total population crosses ten crores. This is the scale on which politics is hot right now.

Two different truths of government and opposition

The opposition alleges that due to administrative laxity, lakhs of genuine voters were left out of the list. The government and its supporters say the process was necessary to remove dead, permanently migrated and fraudulent voters.
In the 17 states and union territories where only the draft roll has been released, the rate of deletion of names has reached 17 percent.

Where the process was completed, the account was somewhat soft.

This entire cycle has been completed in eight states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Gujarat. Here, out of 34 crore 1 lakh voters, only 29 crore 25 lakh names were included in the draft list, but by the time the final list was released, this number increased to 30 crore 36 lakh.
The overall decline was limited to around ten and a half percent. Whereas in Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, when elections were held after the amendment, the final decline was even less, just eight point one percent.

Impact on voting and court threshold

It is also interesting that in the states where votes were cast after the amendment, there was no major decline in the total voting, but due to the smaller list, the voting percentage was seen to be higher. But paper formalities and complex verification have definitely increased the troubles of many genuine voters. West Bengal has emerged as the biggest example of this, where about twenty-seven lakh people have approached the court alleging wrongful removal of their names. In the Brazilian general elections held in 2022, not even this many votes were cast, and leaving India and China aside, there are only fourteen countries left in the world whose total population crosses ten crores. This is the scale on which politics is hot right now.