First time that so many eligible electors have lost their vote due to SIR: former CEC O.P. Rawat

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Former Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat. File. | Photo Credit: PTI

When Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi found that their objections were not heard, especially regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, they should not have stopped at dissent notes, said former Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat. Instead, the two ECs should have ensured that all decisions taken against their will were annulled at the very next meeting of the three-member Commission, he said.

The third member of the Election Commission of India (ECI) is Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Slamming the way the SIR has been carried out, Mr. Rawat noted, in an exclusive interview with The Hindu on Wednesday (September 30, 2026), that this is the first time since Independence that so many eligible electors had lost their voting rights.

Dr. Sandhu and Dr. Joshi had formally objected to various aspects of the SIR, 14 times over a ten-month period. Their objections covered several ECI decisions, including changes to Form 6, and the ECINet portal’s added declaration asking new voters whether they or their parents or grandparents had appeared in the last SIR’s electoral roll.

“They had the majority [in the ECI]. In the very next meeting, when their first objections were not heard, they should have annulled all the decisions taken against which they had an opinion. They should have taken the right decision, which would have prevailed. So obviously, they did not take that route,” the former CEC said.

Mr. Rawat helmed the poll body between January 23, 2018 and December 1, 2018. He had been an Election Commissioner from 2015.

Describing the ECI’s functioning, the former CEC said that Commission meetings were usually held very regularly. Every week, a day was fixed for it, and additional meetings were also held. “All kinds of permutations and combinations were used to ensure that decisions were quick, efficient, and nothing suffered because of pending decisions,” he said.

Asked how Commissioners arrive at a consensus, Mr. Rawat said that when the members are not on the same page, meetings help them understand each other’s point of view and bring about an agreement. In the “one in a million” occasions where consensus cannot be reached, he said, there is the recourse of voting, where the majority opinion prevails.

“The Chief Election Commissioner himself does not have any veto. Absolutely not. He is equivalent to the other Commissioners,” he said.

On the SIR process in West Bengal, he said the damage had already been done before the Assembly election. “93% of the deleted voters whose appeals have been decided by the tribunals were found eligible, and they missed exercising their voting right in the elections. That is something very serious for a democracy,” he pointed out.

Mr Rawat said that the Supreme Court had upheld the Election Commission’s right to hold any kind of special revision of rolls in its judgement on the Bihar SIR.

“The initial paras will give the impression that Election Commission is all powerful. But then in last para, they say that Election Commission will refer all those cases where they found questionable citizenship to a competent authority. And once the competent authority decides, then their names can be included again,” he noted. “But what happens to their vote? No mention of that.”

Questioned about changes in Form 6, which is usually meant for fresh voter registrations but is now also being used to add back the names wrongly excluded during the SIR, Mr. Rawat said that the ECI was doing this on the basis of the Supreme Court judgement of May 27.

“And since it is Supreme Court’s verdict, we all have to obey and follow. Actually, I can’t say anything over and above Honourable Supreme Court’s order. I have to obey, respect Supreme Court’s order. Even if it made so many eligible voters lose their voting right for the first time after independence. Even then I have to respect this order,” he said.

The former CEC said that the recent controversies have cast a shadow over the ECI’s reputation, which had otherwise been “sterling” the world over. “We were called the gold standard everywhere,” he noted.

Offering advice for the future, Mr. Rawat said the ECI “will do well to come out in the open and make everything clear to the people of this country who are the real sovereign and constitutional institutions are only their representatives.” A joint press conference by all three Commissioners would go a long way in clarifying all the “black clouds of doubt”, he said.

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