Sir in Uttar Pradesh. the first cut is deeper

In early 2000, Vimarsh Bajpayee moved out of Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, for professional reasons. Over the years, he has traveled across India for work, and now lives in Delhi, although he owns a house in Lucknow.

His Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC), issued in 1995, a year after he turned 18, shows that he is registered in Arya Nagar, Lucknow. He was also registered as a voter in his native village Mohammadpur in Unnao district, where he has property, but there is no information whether he is still in the voter list there.

When the Election Commission of India (EC) announced Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Voter List in Uttar PradeshThe communications professional was unable to fill out the calculation form because he did not know where to obtain it.

Apurva Snehil Katyayan changed residence within Lucknow, from Lucknow East to Lucknow Cantonment Assembly seat. He contacted his last landlord and Booth Level Officer (BLO) for his enumeration form, but the 40-year-old businessman was asked to fill Form 6 to register as a new voter from his new address.

Ayush Mehrotra and his father Rajivdas Mehrotra, residents of Lucknow West Assembly seat, did not find their names in the draft list despite filling the enumeration form. The BLO cited a technical glitch on the website for this glitch. The fact that Rajiv Das is the brother of Samajwadi Party MLA Ravidas Mehrotra created a small political storm.

The number is 2.89 crores Names removed in UP This is the highest in absolute numbers for any state or union territory where SIR has been conducted so far. In percentage terms, with 18.7%, this union territory is second only to Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

About 14% of the people removed are listed as having been permanently moved or as not being found during the verification process.

Urban areas have been hardest hit, with Lucknow topping the list, followed by Ghaziabad, the urban center adjacent to the National Capital Region. In the SIR process, more than 12 lakh names out of nearly 40 lakh voters have been removed from the 2025 voter list of Lucknow, the highest for any district in UP.

home question

In Gautam Buddha Nagar, adjacent to Delhi, more than 500 kilometers from Lucknow, the name of Kalpana Halder, a domestic help who served food in high-rise apartments in the city, was registered in Noida as well as in her home town in Murshidabad district of West Bengal. When the SIR process started, his name appeared at both the places. He chose Jalangi assembly constituency in West Bengal.

While 30% names were removed in Lucknow, 28% were removed in Ghaziabad, 25% in Kanpur, 24% in Prayagraj and 23.5% in Gautam Buddha Nagar. A voter from booth number 412 of SAM Inter College in Saharanpur assembly constituency, who did not want to be named, said he was registered both in the city and in his native village Harora, which is in Saharanpur district. When SIR was announced, he decided to maintain his voter registration in his village instead of the city.

Grassroots political party activists are worried that with many city dwellers registering themselves in their villages, their carefully crafted pitches to different voting bases could be upset. “Many people want to vote in gram panchayat elections because even one vote counts there. Sometimes they or their family members are candidates,” says Gaurav Garg, BJP’s district media in-charge in Saharanpur. The second reason is that many people associate the right to vote from a particular place with owning property in that area, although there is no connection between the two. According to Election Commission rules, people are eligible to vote from the places where they live, and not necessarily where they own property.

Many BLOs, who are appointed by the Election Commission, as well as booth-level agents (BLAs) appointed by political parties, say there is a lot of duplication because a large section of the people are migrant workers. Most, who come from Bihar and West Bengal, rent rooms in several urban villages in Delhi’s suburbs Noida and Ghaziabad and in UP’s big cities Lucknow and Kanpur.

Data from the voter list of polling station number 2, for example, number 2 in Harola village, Makanpur, Noida, shows that out of 1,148 names, 148 had duplicate voter registrations from outside the state. Voters have opted to maintain registration back to their original locations. Overall, 25.47 lakh voters (1.65%) were registered at more than one place.

Congress leader Gurdeep Singh Sappal and his family moved to Noida from Ghaziabad, which falls under Sahibabad assembly constituency, a year ago. He says he has all his documents and his name was in the voter list of 2003. Yet he was released and has now been asked to fill Form 6.

Form 6, used for new voter registration, includes a declaration stating that the voter is not registered in any other assembly constituency in the country. Any attempt to register at two places is an offense which may result in filing of an FIR at the police station.

“The system is flawed,” says Sappal. “While the Election Commission is accepting Form 8 for correction of entries in the current voter lists, it is not accepting it for change of residence. On one hand they are linking presence in the 2003 rolls to citizenship, on the other they are forcing me and my family to delete our old voter records,” he says, adding that he plans to approach the court over the matter.

Voters’ indifference in filling the form

BLOs in urban centers complain of voter apathy during the counting phase. He says that he had to go to people’s homes several times to get the census forms filled. He says that this is not true for rural areas, adding that even minority dominated areas are not facing this problem.

Residents of towns like Deoband, which have a large Muslim population, say the citizenship claim raised by SIR has left the community worried. Special camps were set up by several NGOs and local community leaders to help people fill the forms in the city, famous for the Darul Uloom Islamic seminary.

The Election Commission has said that if voters have not been mapped in the last SIR in 2003, they will have to produce documents mandated by it to prove their identity and citizenship.

Sitting in his luxurious living room, a few meters away from Darul Uloom in Deoband, Mohd. Wajahat Shah, a retired primary school teacher, says he has spent months since the announcement of the SIR helping people add their names to the 2003 voter lists, organize their documents and later fill out the enumeration forms.

Shah claims that although the draft rolls have seen 100% coverage of those who have filled the enumeration forms, the real battle begins now when the unmapped voters are called for hearings. Hearings are held at different locations in each assembly constituency, where people can prove their identity and citizenship.

Sardhana is in Meerut district, about 70 km from Deoband. Down the narrow, dusty lanes of the sugarcane belt of western Uttar Pradesh, in a sudden open space stands the majestic and astonishingly pristine white structure of the Basilica of Our Lady of Graces.

The over 200-year-old structure, built by the then ruler Begum Samru, a Christian convert from Islam, is one of the largest churches in North India. The city is known for this church and the festivals held here throughout the year.

However, Mohd. Ali Shah, a scion of the former royal family of Sardhana, has only SIR on his mind. He is sitting in his living room-cum-office, sifting through bunches of various forms of EC, which are spread out on a large center table. Ali Shah is leading a team of 65 people including local Samajwadi Party leaders, BLAs and youth volunteers who are helping people negotiate the paper work related to SIR.

Sardhana is part of the Muzaffarnagar Lok Sabha seat, which saw large-scale communal violence in 2013. Sardhana Assembly seat was represented by Sangeet Som of BJP twice in 2012 and 2017. However, in the 2022 assembly elections, he lost to sitting MLA Atul Pradhan, who is from the Samajwadi Party.

Now, with the counting phase over and the draft voter list published on January 6, Ali Shah’s team has focused on those whose names could not be included in the 2003 voter list when the last SIR was conducted, and are likely to be served notices and called for hearing.

He patiently explains to a voter the intricacies of filling out the registration form for his wife. The IT professional-turned-businessman says his team had started an awareness campaign about the entire process and related documents much earlier, when the SIR was announced in October.

As part of the awareness campaign, they made and uploaded videos on social media and took to the streets of Sardhana with loudspeakers, explaining the process of filling the forms and keeping the documents in order.

A local EC official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the documents, especially for women, were a challenge. He says early community mobilization helped.

what lies ahead

In Saharanpur city, more than 100 km from Sardhana, local BJP workers have gathered at SAM Inter College, a polling booth. BLO Amita Gupta sits with the recently published draft voter list published earlier this week. Some workers say they will now focus on adding the names of genuine voters – who have been left out for various reasons – to the final list by helping them fill Form 6.

According to the new schedule announced by the Election Commission after three extensions of the SIR process, the period for receiving claims and objections will be open from January 6 to February 6 and the final roll will be published on March 6.

Meanwhile, officials at the district election office in Ghaziabad are preparing for the battle ahead: collecting documents during the hearing. In the first round of SIR in Bihar in mid-2025, the Election Commission had ordered that in case of voters who could not be mapped in the last SIR conducted two decades ago – documents were to be collected during the enumeration phase.

However, in the second round, the election body directed that the documents in case of unmapped voters will be collected only after the publication of the draft voter list, when notices will be issued and voters will be called for hearing.

A senior official of the Election Commission office in Ghaziabad says that additional Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) have been deputed. Hearing will begin from January 15-16 for those who could not be included in the 2003 SIR roll. An AERO is expected to conduct 50 hearings a day. However, sources in the Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer office say that in many cases, BLOs may be asked to collect the necessary documents and submit them to the AERO office. This can make the process easier for voters.

The SIR process in Uttar Pradesh took 62 days and saw three extensions.

sreeparna.c@thehindu.co.in

Edited by Sunalini Mathew