Jairam Ramesh Targets SIR Over Goa Voter Deletions, Seeks Rollback Of Electoral Roll
Jairam Ramesh Targets SIR Over Goa Voter Deletions, Seeks Rollback Of Electoral Roll Exercise
M.U.H
24/09/202619
On Thursday, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh said the election process had been "thoroughly compromised and vitiated" and accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of running the "Method of Disenfranchising Indians (MODI)". In a post on X, he referred to an Indian Express report on the Special Intensive Revision process.
Ramesh said the Goa Chief Electoral Officer had approached the Election Commission of India eight times in seven days to restore 97 names removed by the ECINet software. He also said Electoral Registration Officers had verified the voters’ eligibility and that EROs and other electoral officers faced limits on access to ECINet. He then cited objections from Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. The Indian Express findings he referred to said the two commissioners raised objections 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders tied to the SIR process.
Goa Opposition Demands Rollback
Goa Forward Party president Vijai Sardesai separately demanded the immediate restoration of the names of all voters deleted from the electoral roll, except those who have died. He said elections in Goa are often decided by narrow margins, sometimes by fewer than 100 votes, and argued that voter deletions could therefore affect the outcome of the 2027 assembly elections.
Sardesai said there was now little time for the Election Commission to conduct the SIR afresh before the polls and called for the entire exercise to be rolled back. However, the BJP has rejected the Opposition's allegations, accusing it of running a campaign to discredit constitutional institutions.
The Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began in Bihar in June 2025 as an exercise to clean up electoral rolls, has resulted in more than 13 crore names being excluded from the draft rolls across 30 states and Union Territories.
The Indian Express investigation said the two commissioners raised formal objections at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions taken by the three-member Election Commission led by CEC Gyanesh Kumar. Their concerns covered voter registration, removal of names, changes to Form 6 and the centralisation of electoral-roll databases.
