ECI's SIR in 12 states: Yogendra Yadav joins South Central on voter rights

In this episode of South Central, hosts Dhanya Rajendran and Anisha Sheth discuss the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls and the controversies surrounding it.The hosts are joined by activist and psephologist Yogendra Yadav.

Published on:

31 Oct 2025, 11:42 am

In this episode of South Central, hosts Dhanya Rajendran and Anisha Sheth first discuss the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls across the country, and the controversies surrounding it. The hosts are joined by activist and psephologist Yogendra Yadav.

Dhanya starts the discussion by recalling the ECI’s press meet about the lesson learnt from conducting the revision in Bihar.

“The ECI is no longer acting as a neutral, Constitutional body. Many of the press conferences are more like PR exercises. Gyanesh Kumar does not need to get votes, unlike politicians. The ECI’s mention of how so many people cooperated with the Revision in Bihar is unnecessary,” Yogendra Yadav says.

“In Bihar, a large number of enumeration forms were forged. So the ECI’s claim of how everyone participated in the revision is not entirely true. The ECI has not learnt that a large-scale exercise like the SIR, mandates the question of whether this was the right move at all. ECI decided that SIR is the medicine and started looking for a disease to fit that. So the improvements mentioned in the media are nothing but ways of administering a medicine, whose efficacy is not tested. SIR fundamentally is a problematic exercise,” he adds.

Yogendra Yadav also says that SIR in fact convinced him that our electoral rolls are even more faulty than any of us would think. “What we need is a simple, old style intensive revision in which home-to-home analysis is done about voters and the rolls are updated accordingly,” he adds.

Dhanya explains the SIR procedure and asks why the normal procedure of BLOs going to every house and verifying information is not sufficient.

“The SIR strives to do two things that have never happened in the history of India. One, SIR shifts the onus of being on the voters’ list from the state to the individual. The state will only facilitate it by giving a form and demanding necessary documents. If the individual fails, their name is deleted from the draft roll itself, which is unlike the procedure previously–notice and hearing before deletion. The second thing is that the SIR is also connected to citizenship,” Yogendra Yadav says.

Anisha asks what happens to someone who is off the voter rolls and cannot vote.

“Determining citizenship is not the task of the ECI, and this is something the Supreme Court has also previously made very clear. But now, the ECI is actively determining citizenship with a penal provision. If an electoral officer finds that a person is a foreigner, their names will be off, but they will also be reported to the government. This is where the loophole to exclude migrants, Muslims and other minorities comes in,” Yogendra says.

In the second part of the discussion, the hosts discuss two High Court orders– one from Kerala and another from Karnataka. They are joined by former lawyer and journalist Sukanya Shaji.

Dhanya starts the discussion off by recalling the orders. In Kerala, a Bengali woman actor accused film director Ranjith of sexual harassment. The incident took place in 2009, but she complained in 2024, in the aftermath of the Hema Committee report. In Karnataka, a woman complained of sexual assault during an interaction with a man she met on a dating app. In both cases, the High Courts quashed the FIRs.

In Ranjith’s case, the incident happened 15 years ago, and the HC said that there can be no cognisance since the case is barred by a limitation of time. The Magistrate court can waive this by stating why it thinks the case is important to be admitted, but there is no such explanation. In Karnataka, the HC says there is no evidence of assault and also says that the woman having gone to meet the man out of her own volition is not indicative of coercion.

“In both cases, the courts have quashed the FIRs, which means these cases will not go into trial. I am of the opinion that this is not a good precedent. The court, especially in the Karnataka case makes a blanket assumption that a woman having agency to meet a man she met online, would have had the agency to walk out also. But what is not factored here is how social agency does not negate gender power imbalance,” says Sukanya.

Dhanya says that several senior lawyers and women have spoken about how agency first and consent later is not a sensible argument, because harassment manifests in very nuanced ways.

Anisha adds that in the Mathura rape case, the court said she was habituated to sex, making a comment on her character, thereby negating rape. “Te notion of consent itself is built against women. In the case of marital rape itself, the idea is that marriage assumes consent,” she says.

“This kind of assumption that agency means consent also contradicts the court’s reasoning about how victims of sexual assault should not be asked about delays in time, considering their trauma. There are also procedural issues like details being lost in first statements to police, shaming, isolation, and so on. The absence of a trial denies the woman and the accused the opportunity to recount the details and to also give us any documentation of the process. This means a lot of nuance about what sexual harassment means and how consent can be vitiated by power and gender privilege is lost,” adds Sukanya.

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Audio Timecodes

00:00:00- Introduction

00:01:44 - CCTV Series

00:02:47 - Headlines