Thousands of opposition supporters filled Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan on Sunday, 1 November, as India’s opposition took its quarrel with the Election Commission onto the streets of the capital and demanded the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The INDIA bloc, an alliance of parties formed in 2023 to challenge Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), accuses Kumar of striking millions of eligible citizens off voter lists. The dispute turns on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a re-verification of electoral rolls that the commission has been conducting in three phases. Opposition leaders call it “vote chori”, Hindi for vote theft, and put the number of deleted names at 13.2 crore. A crore is ten million, so the claim covers 132 million voters.
According to the commission, 13.39 crore entries were flagged during the exercise. Of these, 6.30 crore were marked as having moved permanently, 3.01 crore as absent or untraceable, 2.80 crore as dead and 1.02 crore as duplicates. A flagged entry is not necessarily a deleted one, and the commission maintains that eligible voters left off the final lists can seek inclusion through a claims-and-objections process. In an affidavit, it described its three orders on the SIR as unanimous decisions. It has also ordered a review of its voter-roll software following complaints about how the system works.
Addressing the gathering, Anil A Thomas, vice-chairman of the Congress party’s minority department, said the revision had hit Muslims, Christians and Sikhs disproportionately. In an interview with Outlook magazine, he alleged that some living members of minority communities had been marked as dead, and called for Kumar’s immediate suspension or removal. G Devarajan, general secretary of the All India Forward Bloc, a Left party, insisted that the protest targeted no religion, only those weakening the country’s democratic traditions.
The day began at the residence of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, where Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and the heads of three communist parties assembled. An open bus took them to the Minto Road junction near Connaught Place, and they marched the remaining distance under the slogan “Chalo Dilli, Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” (March to Delhi, Save the Vote, Save the Nation). Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Tejashwi Yadav of Bihar and two former chief ministers of Jammu and Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah and Mehbooba Mufti, also attended.
Ramlila Maidan takes its name from the Ramlila, an annual stage retelling of the Hindu epic Ramayana. The open space in central Delhi has been the setting for landmark protests, including Jayaprakash Narayan’s 1975 rally against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government and the anti-corruption agitation of 2011.
This time, the flags of the Congress, the Left parties, the Samajwadi Party and the Rashtriya Janata Dal crowded the field. Protesters from Karnataka unrolled a cloth banner stretching several metres, bearing names they said had been struck off the rolls, and others carried large sheets made to look like voter lists. Police carved the venue into 14 security zones, and close to 10,000 police and paramilitary personnel stood guard across central Delhi, supported by drones and more than 200 CCTV cameras.
Speakers aimed their sharpest words at the CEC. Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, told the crowd that Kumar would lose his post and eventually go to jail over the alleged vote theft, and that Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah would face legal action next. Kharge promised that citizens would find Kumar even if he tried to hide underground, and urged them to “remove Modi to save democracy.”
Others spoke of battles closer to home. Akhilesh Yadav turned to Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which elects a new legislature in 2027, and claimed that 1.27 crore voters whose names had been dropped were Hindus. Amit Shah had recently compared the BJP to the foot of Angad, a Ramayana character whose planted foot no one could move. Yadav predicted that voters would dislodge the party, and named inflation, joblessness among the young and curbs on the media as issues that could cost it. Mamata Banerjee, whose Trinamool Congress lost power in West Bengal to the BJP in May, said: “Bengal is a victim of SIR; we will not spare them, we will fight.” She also mocked Kumar with a parody of the nursery rhyme “Johnny Johnny Yes Papa”.
The rally is one front in a wider campaign. The opposition has also taken its case to President Droupadi Murmu and the Supreme Court, which is due to hear petitions against the SIR on 17 November.
