New Delhi: In Bihar, after the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision drive of electoral rolls from June to September 2025, most of the deleted voters from the roll hold Muslim names, a report by The Wire suggested.
Further, the report suggested that a detailed analysis of constituency-wise data from the SIR process revealed that 32 per cent of 3,23,000 voters deleted from the list, after ground-level verification, were Muslims. This is against the initial statistics of voters that were sent for scrutiny, where only 24.7 per cent of voters were Muslims from a significantly larger pool of 65,75,222 votes.
According to The Wire, the disparity, as per data, is wider in the Seemanchal area of the state, both in terms of absolute numbers of those with Muslim names who found themselves excluded, as well as the percentage of exclusion experienced by Muslims here.
The report also states, “large absolute numbers of excluded Muslims may be expected as these areas have a high proportion of Muslims, the percentage of exclusion for Muslims being higher here, is a matter of concern.”
This major disparity questions the equitable implementation of SIR, which the ECI called a “grand success”.
The report highlights that when SIR is a two-stage process designed to remove ineligible voters, the data shows the composition of those deleted changed dramatically between stages.
When the deletion rate of a flagged non-Muslim voter was 4.18 per cent, the same for a Muslim voter was 6.38 per cent.
“This means that once a citizen was placed on the scrutiny list, their chances of losing their franchise were over 50% higher if they had a Muslim-sounding name,” The Wire report suggested.