Hello,
As the Special Intensive Revision creeps across the nation, evidence keeps stacking up that it was always a concerted exercise by the party in power to remove minorities [read: Muslims] from the voter rolls. Yet the Supreme Court looked away, and the Election Commission kept up the same drumbeat that SIR is just a cleanup exercise, nothing else to see here.
They seem blissfully unaware of the trick the BJP has weaponised repeatedly across the first two phases of the revision. Of how local BJP operatives have been filing mass deletion requests against Muslims voters, using a form meant for individual complaints, to strike off names by the hundreds.
Ayushi Kar’s latest investigation catches this playout again, this time in Bhadrak, Odisha. She found BJP’s booth-level agents filed over 100 Form 7 deletion requests each, across at least 30 booths, every one of them with over 90 percent Muslim voters. The Election Commission caps such filings at 10 a day, but somehow, nobody noticed. Forget prosecuting anyone.
It isn’t just Odisha where this is happening. We’ve tracked the same pattern in Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Assam and Uttarakhand. Bhadrak is just the latest entry in a consistent pattern across states.
Read the full story to see how it unfolded in Bhadrak: BJP Targets Muslim Voters for Deletion from an Odisha Constituency
Stories like these take weeks of digging through documents and reluctant sources. And if you’d like to see more of this kind of reporting, consider donating to The Collective.
Warm regards,
Furquan Ameen
Managing Editor
The Reporters’ Collective