The Congress on Sunday (August 31, 2025) said the party had filed 89 lakh complaints with the Election Commission of India (ECI), and possessed stamped receipts as evidence, contrary to the ECI’s claims that there were “zero complaints” against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar.

“The party has asserted that all the deleted names would have to be verified again,” Pawan Khera, All India Congress Committee chairperson of the media and publicity department, said, addressing a press conference at the party’s State headquarters.

Mr. Khera was accompanied by Bihar Congress president Rajesh Ram, and other senior leaders, including Akhilesh Prasad and Shakeel Ahmad.

“The ECI keeps getting news planted through its sources that no complaints are coming from any political party. The truth is that the Congress submitted 89 lakh complaints pertaining to irregularities in the SIR to the ECI,“ Mr. Khera said.

While the Congress did not want any illegal voter in the electoral rolls, at the same time it did not want any rightful voter to be removed from the list, whether deliberately or inadvertently, he added.

”Despite blatant resistance from the ECI to the complaints, district Congress committee presidents secured the signed and stamped receipts form the District Electoral Officers. The ECI refused to accept complaints and objections from the booth-level agents, saying the complaints should be from the individual complainants and not from political parties,” Mr. Khera said

The ECI had broadly cited four reasons for the deletion of names from the voter list, Mr. Khera said. While names of 25 lakh voters had been deleted on the alleged pretext of migration, 22 lakh voters were said to be dead, 9.7 lakh voters had been marked as ‘not found’ at their given addresses, and seven lakh names had been deleted since they were registered elsewhere as well.

There were plenty of cases where a single voter had been given two EPIC (elector photo identity card) numbers, Mr. Khera claimed.

Mr. Khera said that some intriguing patterns were noticed in the SIR, as there were 20,638 booths where more than 100 names had been deleted. There were 1,988 booths where more than 200 names had been deleted, he added. In 7,613 booths, 70% of the deleted names were those of women voters, and in 635 booths, over 75% of the voters deleted under the migrant category were women, Mr. Khera said.

It sounded strange as it was typically men who migrated for work, he said. Women seemed to have been specifically targeted for deletion, the Congress leader alleged.

In 7,931 booths, 75% of voters had been removed as they were said to have died, he said. There were serious discrepancies in this category as many of the voters who had been declared dead in the SIR had met Congress leader Rahul Gandhi afterward, Mr. Khera said.

In light of these discrepancies, all the deleted names must be verified again by the ECI, he said. The ECI must confirm the status of each such voter by carrying out a door-to-door verification, Mr. Khera said.

Bihar Congress president Rajesh Ram said that a detailed scrutiny of the deleted names had confirmed what Mr. Gandhi had warned of long ago.

The ECI had said in the very beginning that the names of about 20% of voters would be deleted because of migration, and that’s exactly what had happened, Mr. Ram said.

“This suggests that the ECI was operating with a pre-conditioned mindset. The irony lies in the fact that most of the voters whose names have been deleted from the electoral rolls do not even know about it,” Mr. Ram said.

Later, the Bihar ECI office issued a press note denying the Bihar Congress’s allegations. “Till date, no booth-level agent authorised by any district president of the Indian National Congress in Bihar has submitted any claim (Form 6) or objection (Form 7) on any name in the draft electoral rolls published on 1st August 2025 in the prescribed format so far,” the ECI said.