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Hyderabad MP and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) president Asaduddin Owaisi has submitted a representation to C Sudarsha Reddy, Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana, raising concerns over the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state.
Owaisi noted that the pre-printed enumeration forms are expected to contain only details from the 2025 electoral roll, while requiring voters to manually fill in information from the 2002 list.
He requested that the data collected during the pre-SIR mapping exercise be included in the pre-printed forms, that contain details from both the 2002 rolls and the latest ones. Even for voters for whom mapping was completed, the process was done on an app by the BLO, and no acknowledgement was provided to them with details from both 2002 and 2025, he said.
“We kindly request that a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) be issued to address such anomalies and to enable the enrollment of such electors in the final roll,” he said in the representation.
The pre-SIR mapping exercise is ongoing in Telangana. House-to-house visits by BLOs will be conducted between June 25 to July 24. The draft electoral roll will be published on July 31. The window for filing claims and objections is from July 31 to August 30. The final electoral roll will be published on October 1.
Owaisi also asked the Election Commission to provide enumeration forms in English and Urdu in addition to Telugu.
Speaking to the media after submitting the representation, Owaisi said: “We believe that the greatest power the citizens of India have is the right to vote, especially the poor, regardless of which community they belong to. That is why our effort is that the names of every citizen of this country, no matter which community they belong to, should be included in the voter list.”
“There are fascist forces in this country who want to deprive the poor of their right to vote, especially Dalits and Muslims,” he said.
He added, “In my constituency alone, there are 18 lakh voters, and the BLOs will surely go to each one of them. But you will not be able to cover it in a month. Especially during the monsoon.”
He requested the ECI to make sure the SIR process remains inclusive.
Earlier, on June 3, Owaisi had criticised the SIR saying it would be used to create a permanent class of excluded Indians.
“The Union government first carried out a document-driven SIR that deleted nearly 6.5 crore names from electoral rolls across 13 States and UTs. Now it wants a committee to study those very exclusions and build a permanent system for the identification, detention, and deportation of illegal immigrants,” Owaisi said in a social media post.
“Under the law, a deletion under SIR does not mean that a person is not a citizen. Twenty-seven lakh people are still under adjudication, and many may apply afresh for enrolment as voters through Form 6. The ECI itself has provided no data on the number of people it excluded because they were foreigners. Available data show that most of those excluded by SIR are Muslims, women, the poor, and migrants,” wrote the MP.
“The government's own data show that our demography and population have stabilised and that our TFR is 2.0. Why do we need this committee, then? So that there can be constant paranoia and fear directed against Muslims,” he said. TFR refers to Total Fertility Rate, the average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime.