Uttar Pradesh’s chief electoral officer went on video to call a news report false, and ended up confirming its most damning finding: 85,854 voters were put up for deletion on forms that stated no reason.
Navdeep Rinwa dismissed the Reporters Collective’s latest report as full of “falsehoods and inaccuracies” on X within minutes of its publication on Friday, October 9, and promised a rebuttal. That evening he released a video calling it “misleading”. According to the Collective, the video itself confirmed its central finding: software used by the Election Commission of India (ECI) forced election officers in the state to sign 85,854 forms deleting voters without stating a reason during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
What the video left out
The Collective says Rinwa did not explain why most of these auto-generated forms carried no reason. He also did not address its finding that some forms had only a single letter, such as “A”, “N”, “H” or “E”, in the reason field.
A stated reason for deletion is mandatory under the law and under the ECI’s own modified SIR rules. The rules require an officer who starts a suo motu inquiry into a voter on the draft roll to pass a “speaking order”, a written order giving the reason for deletion.
Muslim voters and the CEO’s numbers
Rinwa also acknowledged the Collective’s finding that more than 200 attempts had been made to delete Muslim voters en masse in Uttar Pradesh. He did not dispute it. He cited it as evidence that the SIR was carried out successfully, calling the numbers insignificant.
“The total number of names against which [bulk] deletion complaints were made through these Form 7s was only about 4,700. In Uttar Pradesh, which has a population in crores and where we have 13.39 crore [voters]. They found only 4,700 such names where there were multiple Form 7s,” he said.
His other defence was that every voter deleted through these Form 7 submissions got a notice stating the ground for the hearing, either that the voter was “unmapped” or had “logical discrepancies” in the records. The Collective says he again did not say how many voters fall under each category. He also withheld these figures at his last press conference and in the press release issued after the final roll was published.
A pattern in the state
The Collective had earlier found that application details of 16.18 lakh newly added voters were missing from the CEO’s website, a breach of the law. When it first approached Rinwa, he reportedly said his office does not offer consultancy services to resolve doubts or queries.
After the report was published, the Collective says, he acknowledged the findings and claimed everything had been done in line with the law and the ECI’s internal instructions. It says the instructions it then obtained showed that his office had flouted them.
ECI silent, tightens rules
The ECI headquarters has not come out in support of Rinwa. On the same day the report was published, it ordered that no person can file more than 30 objections a month seeking deletion of voters, revising the SIR protocol yet again. It had earlier removed the cap on bulk deletion applications.
The Collective also found that all these applications were filed after the claims and objections period had ended, though the law says voters must be told the reason they are being deleted.
With Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh expected in February-March, the Collective says wrongful additions or deletions of voters so close to the polls carry urgent political consequences. It says the irregularities in the state’s rolls have not been seen in any other state so far.
