Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has launched a sweeping critique of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, calling the large-scale deletion of voters “a scam,” questioning the legal basis of the exercise, and suggesting that officials who wrongly removed genuine voters could face criminal liability. The Election Commission maintains the revision is a lawful clean-up of the rolls.
New Delhi: Former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) S.Y. Quraishi has mounted one of the sharpest critiques yet of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, describing the large-scale deletion of voters as “100% a scam,” questioning the constitutional and statutory foundation of the exercise, and suggesting that officials responsible for wrongful deletions could be exposed to criminal prosecution.
The remarks, made in a television interview and echoing statements Quraishi has made publicly in recent weeks, are the views of a former head of the very institution now under scrutiny, and they are contested. The ECI has consistently maintained that the SIR is a lawful and necessary exercise to purify the rolls by removing duplicate, deceased, shifted and ineligible entries while protecting genuine voters. This report sets out Quraishi’s criticisms as his own assessment, alongside the Commission’s stated position; the underlying disputes are the subject of pending proceedings before the Supreme Court.
‘15% of the population wiped out’
Quraishi’s central objection is to the scale of the deletions. He contended that across the areas where the SIR has been conducted, very large numbers, “between 12 to 15%”, of electors have been removed, a figure he called “huge” and counter-intuitive. In the ordinary course, he argued, an electoral roll should grow at each revision because the population grows: “typically in a village of about 1,000 people if three are born one dies, so therefore there is a net addition every time. So this wholesale deletion which has been happening is surprising and raises a question mark.”
He was particularly critical of what he described as deletions carried out quietly and without recourse. Millions, he said, were removed even before the draft rules were published, and described as “removals” rather than “deletions”, a semantic distinction he argued left affected voters with “no appeal, no cause of action” as if “nothing has happened.” That, he said, “needs to be audited, needs to be investigated,” and suggested “something very suspicious and wrong is happening.” The contention that the rolls, in his words, went from “perfect in February of 2025” to “junk and rotten” within three months was, he argued, evidence of “a design.”
The West Bengal figures and the ‘logical discrepancy’ category
Quraishi’s concerns find their sharpest illustration in West Bengal, where the numbers are on the public record and are the subject of litigation. According to the pleadings in petitions before the Supreme Court, the draft electoral roll published in the State in December 2025 reflected the deletion of over 58 lakh names, a decline from around 7.66 crore voters after the 2025 summary revision to about 7.08 crore on the draft roll. Following adjudication of contested cases, reports placed the total number of names removed in the State at around 91 lakh, combining earlier deletions with voters declared ineligible after adjudication, though a very large number of cases were also placed “under adjudication” before judicial officers.
Quraishi singled out what he said was the application of a “logical discrepancy” category only in West Bengal, arguing that if a unique standard is applied to one State when “the rules are for the whole country,” that “itself becomes questionable.” He further asserted that a very high proportion of the cases decided by adjudicators had found the deletions to be wrongful, submitting that this meant “the purity of the election has actually been disturbed” and raising, in his view, “serious and disturbing questions about the credibility of the Bengal elections.” These are Quraishi’s characterisations; the adjudication outcomes and their implications are themselves contested and are among the matters before the courts.
‘It is a scam’: the call for criminal accountability
The most striking of Quraishi’s claims is his characterisation of the exercise as criminal. Describing the deletion of a genuine voter as the taking away of a constitutional right under Article 326, he argued that “interfering with free and fair election is an offence,” and that officials “down the line which may have indulged in that, we should look at the possibility of prosecuting them criminally.” He drew a distinction between the Election Commissioners at the top, whom he said a legal technicality protects from prosecution, and the lower-level officers, whom he described as “vulnerable.”
He also alleged, on the basis of what he said he had been told by “many people including officers,” that instructions to delete names were being conveyed through informal channels, “WhatsApp messages go that these names have to be deleted, no questions asked”, and that officers who questioned such directions were warned they “will be in trouble.” He claimed officials had additionally been asked to prepare a list of some “20 VIPs” whose names were to be protected from deletion to avoid an uproar. These are serious allegations, advanced by Quraishi on the basis of accounts relayed to him; they are untested, and LawChakra has not independently verified them. Notably, the use of informal WhatsApp channels for SIR instructions is itself one of the specific grievances raised in petitions before the Supreme Court, where petitioners have sought a declaration that such instructions are illegal.
The legal argument: what the law says about ‘special revision’
Beyond the rhetoric, Quraishi advanced a specific legal argument about the source of the ECI’s power. He pointed out that the phrase “Special Intensive Revision” appears neither in the Constitution nor in the Representation of the People Acts of 1950 and 1951, nor in the election rules. The nearest statutory hook, he said, is the provision in the Representation of the People Act, 1950 that empowers the Commission to direct a “special revision” of the electoral roll for any constituency “or part of a constituency” for reasons to be recorded, a power he argued is meant for a specific constituency or area, “not wholesale, the entire country.” On his reading, a nationwide “intensive” revision stretches a provision designed for the targeted correction of a particular roll.
He also revived his long-standing critique of the mechanics of the exercise, arguing that critical power had been vested in the “lowest level of administration”, the Booth Level Officer, and that the marking of a voter as “doubtful” could cost that person their vote for years while they fought to be restored. He pointed to the Bihar SIR, where, he said, the stated aim of finding illegal immigrants had yielded, on media reports, only a few hundred foreign nationals after “8 crore people” were made to “run around”, a yield he argued a lighter “summary revision” could have achieved without the disruption.
Criticism of the Supreme Court and the appointments law
Quraishi also turned a critical eye on the judiciary’s response. He questioned the reported approach of deploying judicial officers to adjudicate the contested deletions, describing it as “pushing the judiciary into executive work” that would inevitably become “questionable” and subject to criticism, and argued that the Commission itself, rather than “poor judicial officers,” should have been made to do the entire exercise. He pressed the point with a rhetorical flourish: “if the traffic outside is not working properly will you send a session judge to control it?”
He linked the controversy to his familiar demand for reform of how Election Commissioners are appointed, recalling that the Supreme Court had earlier envisaged a non-partisan appointment mechanism, but that the law subsequently enacted placed the selection in the hands of a panel in which the government commands a majority, an arrangement he criticised as undercutting the Commission’s independence. He renewed his call for the ECI to file an affidavit before the Supreme Court guaranteeing the purity of the revised rolls and accepting liability, “even criminally”, for wrongful deletions or inclusions, and argued that the focus on deletions must be matched by scrutiny of what kind of “inclusions” were being made.
The ECI’s position, and the wider context
The Election Commission has firmly defended the SIR. Its consistent position is that the revision is aimed at improving the accuracy of the electoral rolls by removing duplicate, deceased, shifted or otherwise ineligible entries, while protecting the rights of eligible voters, and that established procedures, including provisions for claims, objections and appeals, safeguard genuine electors. On the integrity of the process, it is relevant that the Commission has itself acted against irregularities: in West Bengal, the ECI directed the filing of FIRs against several suspended officials accused of illegally including fake or non-existent names in the rolls, an indication that the machinery for policing wrongful entries has been invoked.
The dispute is, ultimately, one for the courts. The legality of the SIR, the manner of the deletions, the use of informal instruction channels, and the fate of voters placed under adjudication are all live questions in petitions pending before the Supreme Court, which has been closely monitoring the exercise and the appellate process for excluded voters. Quraishi’s intervention is significant because it comes from a former head of the institution, and because it frames the controversy in unusually stark terms, as a question not merely of administrative error but of the credibility of elections and the possible criminal liability of officials. Whether those characterisations are borne out is a separate question from the fact of their being made; they are his assessment, strongly contested by the Commission, and the definitive answers will come from the constitutional court now seized of the matter, not from the political debate. This report deals with a contested political controversy and presents the competing positions rather than endorsing any.