AMID the escalating political battle over deletion of voters under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) defended the electoral roll revision exercise on Monday, stating that the exercise was nothing new but an ongoing process since the country’s Independence for maintaining “purity and accuracy” of the voters list. BJP MP Sambit Patra said that the country has undertaken 10 roll revisions under SIR over the past seven decades, 10 of which were done during Congress regimes, and that the one initiated in 2025 under CEC Gyanesh Kumar was the 12th such exercise.

 

Addressing a press conference in Varanasi, Patra stated, “The SIR is conducted to maintain cleanliness and accuracy of electoral rolls. This is the 12th SIR. Ten SIR exercises were conducted during Congress rule and two during our Government’s tenure.” Rejecting the Opposition’s objections over deletion of voter names, he said that the cleaning of electoral rolls was a routine exercise, under which names of those who have shifted, died, are absent, or are duplicates are removed from the voters list toensure that only genuine Indian citizens are eligible to vote and ‘infiltrators’ are removed.