After the draft list under Uttar Pradesh’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was published, the potential deletion of nearly 2.89 crore voters has triggered anxiety not just among political parties, but among ordinary citizens as well.
Meerut is among the districts worst hit by these deletions. A total of 6,65,647 votes have been struck off here, with 1,54,739 deletions recorded in just one segment. The Election Commission’s explanation is that the removed voters are either deceased, have shifted elsewhere, or are untraceable.
To test this claim against ground reality, we travelled to the South assembly constituency of Meerut. In the Muslim-majority village of Zahidpur, we found that even voters whose names appear in the 2003 electoral rolls have been removed. Many of them are neither deceased nor relocated, but families that have lived in the village for generations.
Seventy-year-old Sharif Khan says: “I have voted all my life. I even voted in the last Lok Sabha election. Yet my name has been deleted from the voter list.” While the names of other members of his family appear in the draft rolls, Sharif’s does not.
Munish from Meerut, affected by the draft, says, “Without a vote, it’s as if we don’t exist. Our vote must remain.”
Before SIR, Zahidpur had 6,096 voters. The draft list now records only 4,279.
Watch our full report to understand how the official machinery is responding to these concerns.
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