Sibal asks the Supreme Court to stop bulk voter deletions under SIR

Kapil Sibal on 2 September asked the Supreme Court to halt bulk deletions from electoral rolls under the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision, and said the exercise was being used to help the Bharatiya Janata Party win elections.

The Independent Rajya Sabha MP and former Union minister spoke after an Indian Express report from Godda in Jharkhand. The report described BJP booth agents filing deletion requests that Booth Level Officers, who work for a JMM-Congress state government, had flagged as aimed at minority voters. Sibal wrote on X that the politics was exclusion, that BJP agents were targeting Muslims, and that the Court needed to stop it.

The numbers he put on the table

At a press conference he described Form 7, the deletion form, as a tool that can be filed in bulk. A worker can arrive with 45 names, or 100, or 400, ask for each name to come off the roll, give no reason, and face no consequence if the claim is false, he said.

He gave three tallies. In Delhi, he said, 45 to 47 lakh names have been cut from an electorate of about 1.5 crore, which he put at 23 to 24 percent of the list. In Uttar Pradesh he put the figure at 2.05 crore. Across the states where SIR has run, he said five to six crore names have been removed since the process started. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has separately cited more than 2.06 crore electors left off Maharashtra's draft rolls after revision.

Those figures are campaign numbers as well as administrative numbers. The Election Commission has not, in the same news cycle, published a reconciled all-India deletion total that matches Sibal's five-to-six-crore claim. The Godda report is a local document. The Delhi and Uttar Pradesh totals need a Commission table before they can be treated as settled. What is not in dispute is that SIR has produced draft rolls with large drops, and that opposition parties have made those drops the centre of their argument.

The political stack around the legal ask

Sibal's remarks landed a day after Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi called the Commission names in Hindi that accuse it of saving the BJP's chair and stealing votes. Sibal's contribution is the request for a judicial stop, plus a mechanical description of Form 7 that any High Court or the Supreme Court can test against the Commission's own handbook.

If Form 7 can be filed in hundreds without a stated reason, the revision is only as honest as the booth officer who accepts or rejects the pile. If the officer is a state employee in a non-BJP state, as in Godda, the pile becomes a fight between the agent and the officer. If the officer is aligned with the filer, the pile becomes a quiet edit.

The Supreme Court already has SIR-related matters on its docket from earlier rounds. Sibal is asking it to treat bulk deletion, rather than individual disputes, as the question. That is a different case. An individual whose name is missing can file a claim. A community that says it is being removed by the hundred needs a court to look at the form, the reason field, and the penalty for a false pile.

Until the Commission answers with its own table, the public file contains Sibal's tallies, Gandhi's Maharashtra figure, and one district report from Godda. The Court can ask for the table. That would be the first useful next step.