Political analyst and founder of Swaraj Abhiyan, Yogendra Yadav, on Friday (August 1, 2025) said though the overall number of 7.24 crore voters in the draft voter list released by the Election Commission (EC) was not surprising, it was disappointing that the poll panel had not yet released the 65 lakh names which had been removed from the list. He said Bihar had 8.18 crore adults according to the census and the draft rolls had only 7.24 crore names. “The EC is not even ashamed of it,” he told The Hindu.

Mr. Yadav said “the real game begins now”. The category called “not recommended by the Booth Level Officer” would come up for special scrutiny and that was going to be the first candidate for deletion, he said, adding that those people who would fail to submit documents in the next one month could also face deletion. “The numbers could be huge,” Mr. Yadav said, and maintained that if anyone objected, a lot of other voters could also find their names deleted from the list. “On these three grounds, people may still be eliminated. So 65 lakh is just the beginning,” he said.

The political analyst said that in the two districts which had higher concentration of Muslim population, Purnia and Kishanganj, the proportion was slightly below the State level. “But not dramatically so, not alarmingly so,” Mr. Yadav said. “The EC has been proclaiming from the rooftop that they have made these deleted names available to the political parties. Where is the list? Sadly, the EC has not released that list and the format in which the EC has released the information today makes it virtually impossible to compare it with the previous list,” he added. “It is virtually impossible to extract that information, and that is not befitting a constitutional authority like the EC. The list conceals more than it reveals,” he said.

Mr. Yadav urged that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise should be scrapped right away. “It is absolutely unconstitutional exercise. This is not just an exercise for revision of electoral roll. It is an exercise for changing the architecture of India’s universal adult franchise. For the first time, the onus is being put on the voter and the presumption is of non-citizenship. These two fundamental things go against the very tenets of universal adult franchise in a country like India,” he said.