Manipur and Sikkim drop 1.85 lakh names after the 2026 special intensive revision

Final photo electoral rolls for Manipur and Sikkim were published on 6 September after the Special Intensive Revision. Combined deletions came to about 1.85 lakh names. Manipur fell from 20,93,076 electors before the exercise to 19,60,620, a cut of 1,32,456 or 6.3 percent. Sikkim fell from 4,71,081 to 4,18,467, a cut of 52,614 or 11.2 percent. A parallel Sikkim briefing put the pre-SIR figure at 4,71,018 and described a net drop of 14,827 from the July draft.

Manipur's draft roll, issued on 5 July, had 19,34,399 names. Enumeration forms were not received from 1,58,677 electors. The chief electoral officer classified those absences as 72,473 shifted, 43,000 deceased, 34,740 absent, 7,394 duplicate and 1,070 other. During claims and objections the office processed 96,985 filings. Some names came back. The final roll still sits 1.32 lakh below the starting point.

Manipur now has 10,06,962 women, 9,53,350 men and 308 third-gender electors. Analysis of the draft deletions found a heavier cut in the 19 Assembly seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes, the constituencies that are home to most Kuki-Zo and Naga voters. Kuki-Zo groups said before and during the revision that people displaced after the violence that began on 3 May 2023 would be struck off. The state government said that would not happen. The reserved-seat pattern in the draft list is why that argument has not ended with publication.

Sikkim received 4,33,242 enumeration forms, 91.99 percent of those issued. The rest, 37,737 forms, were classed as deceased, absent, shifted, duplicate or other. Of the mapped electors, 52,384 cases were flagged as logical discrepancies by the Election Commission's system. In the claims window from 5 July to 4 August the state took 2,052 Form 6 claims for inclusion, 16,867 Form 7 objections and 1,549 Form 8 corrections. After disposal, 1,982 electors were added and 16,809 deleted from the draft. The final roll has 2,12,534 men, 2,05,931 women and two third-gender electors. Chief electoral officer Raj Kumar Yadav announced the numbers in Gangtok on Monday.

A roll is a list of people who may vote. A cut of 6.3 percent in a state still living with internal displacement is not a clerical footnote. A cut of 11.2 percent in a state of 4.7 lakh electors is larger still. The published reasons, shifted, deceased, absent, duplicate, are ordinary in every revision. The question that will follow these two rolls into court and into campaign meetings is whether those labels were applied evenly in the hill seats of Manipur and in the discrepancy cases of Sikkim. The documents that will answer that are the booth-level deletion lists already posted by the two CEOs.