Opposition lawmakers led by Rahul Gandhi were detained in New Delhi on Tuesday after marching towards the Election Commission and staging a prolonged protest demanding Kumar’s resignation. The confrontation, following demonstrations in several cities, has pushed the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, beyond a domestic political dispute and into wider international coverage focused on voter deletions, transparency and institutional independence.
Major overseas publications have highlighted the scale of the exercise and the allegations surrounding it. About 130 million names have disappeared from draft or final electoral rolls during successive phases of the revision, according to tallies compiled from official electoral data. The figure does not represent a final count of people permanently disenfranchised: some names have been restored through claims and objections, while the Election Commission says deletions include dead, shifted, duplicate and otherwise ineligible electors.
The Commission rejects allegations that the SIR has been manipulated to favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. It says the exercise is intended to ensure that every eligible citizen remains registered while ineligible entries are removed. The BJP has also denied opposition claims that changes to the rolls were politically directed.
International attention intensified this week as the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, Associated Press, Reuters and Germany’s Deutsche Welle carried reports on the protests, voter deletions or legal challenges surrounding the revision. Their coverage has placed particular emphasis on the unusually large number of names affected, documentation requirements faced by voters and claims that poorer and minority communities may bear a disproportionate burden.
The widening foreign coverage has also examined whether procedural safeguards can keep pace with a revision affecting hundreds of millions of electors. That question has become central as courts assess challenges while political parties dispute both the legality of individual decisions and their consequences.
Those claims remain contested. Opposition parties and civil-rights campaigners say eligible citizens have been wrongly removed and allege that the process has damaged confidence in the neutrality of the poll body. The Commission maintains that safeguards, claims procedures and field verification are available to protect legitimate voters, and has announced special efforts to identify eligible people omitted during the revision.
Judicial scrutiny has added another layer to the controversy. The Supreme Court on Monday sought responses from the Election Commission, the Union government, Kumar and other senior poll officials over allegations that important decisions were taken without proper collective approval. The court declined to suspend Kumar, saying it could not act on assumptions or media reports before examining the record.
A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant indicated that decisions found to have violated statutory requirements could later be set aside. The proceedings concern allegations that fellow Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded objections to decisions involving the SIR and voter-registration procedures. The allegations have not been judicially established.
The dispute has also reached international human-rights forums. Three United Nations-appointed experts wrote to the government earlier this year seeking information about allegations of discrimination against Bengali and Muslim electors during the revision, particularly in West Bengal, and about safeguards intended to prevent eligible citizens from losing voting rights.
Tuesday’s confrontation in Delhi sharpened the institutional stand-off. Gandhi said opposition MPs wanted to meet the commissioners over electoral-roll concerns. The Election Commission said no political party had sought an appointment through the prescribed procedure before 4 pm. It said police later informed it that a delegation wanted to meet the Commission and submit a memorandum.
The protests have spread beyond Congress. Student groups, civil-society organisations and the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party have joined demonstrations demanding Kumar’s departure and suspension of the SIR, while opposition leaders in Mumbai have organised marches against the revision.
