New Delhi – A staggering six lakh Muslim voters were excluded from the final draft of the electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by the Election Commission in Bihar.
According to an analysis by political activist Yogendra Yadav and his colleague Rahul Shastri, the exclusion process during the SIR disproportionately affected Muslims and women, far beyond their population share in the state.
“Muslims were 24.7% of the 65 lakh voters excluded from the draft electoral rolls and 33% of the 3.66 lakh names deleted from the final list, against their population share of 16.9% in the Census. This translates to nearly six lakh ‘excess exclusion’ of Muslims,” noted Yadav and Shastri in an article published in The Indian Express.
The article also highlighted the negligible number of foreigners detected during the voter verification drive, contradicting repeated claims by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders about the presence of Rohingya and Bangladeshi nationals in the voter lists.
Despite public claims, the Election Commission’s daily bulletins during the SIR did not provide any figures on foreigners detected during house-to-house verification. The analysis noted:
“The BJP did not file a single objection to any elector on this ground. The website of the CEO of Bihar displays 2.4 lakh readable records of objections to draft rolls. Of these, only 1,087 cases (0.015% of the total electorate) were about someone not being an Indian citizen,” the article stated.
Furthermore, the credibility of many of these objections was questioned.
“Even these cases were mostly dubious (779 of these were self-objections, someone complaining against himself for being a foreigner!) or presumably Nepali (since only 226 names were that of Muslims). In any case, the ECI has accepted only 390 of these objections (of which only 87 are Muslims) and deleted their names. No wonder the CEC is not keen to share the data on foreigners whose names were deleted,” the article added.
In addition to Yadav and Shastri’s findings, it is being reported that Muslim-dominated constituencies in the Seemanchal region faced the highest percentage of exclusions from the voter list.
Districts such as Kishanganj, Purnia, Bhagalpur, Madhubani, and Gopalganj recorded the largest number of deletions. An analysis by The Wire found that the Seemanchal region was the epicenter of voter deletions from the minority community.
In four constituencies alone — Araria (4,182), Sikta (4,040), Katihar (3,644), and Jokihat (2,836) — more than 14,000 Muslim voters were removed from the electoral rolls.
In total, over one lakh Muslim voters were permanently deleted, making up 32% of the total 3,23,372 deletions.
The Congress party has also raised concerns and accused the Election Commission of targeting Muslims and Dalits in the voter exclusion process.
