'Hit the streets': Prakash Raj demands SIR be scrapped and the poll chief forced out

The demand has moved from the press club to the street. Actor and activist Prakash Raj has called for the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls to be scrapped altogether, for the pre-revision rolls to be restored, and for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to be forced to resign and held accountable for deletions that campaigners say have stripped citizens of their vote.

Raj's charge, made at recent public meetings and press interactions in Hyderabad and Karnataka, is that an exercise presented as cleaning the rolls has become, in practice, a deleting exercise. He has pointed to his teams' checks across booths in Karnataka, where voters who had lived at the same address for years found themselves marked absent, shifted or dead, and were then asked to reapply as if they were new voters. For a daily-wage worker, a migrant, or a family in a slum settlement with a voter card but few other papers, that fresh application is not a formality. It is a door that can stay shut.

The wider campaign around him has set out the same sequence of demands in public: reverse the revision, publish booth-level deletion lists in machine-readable form, repeal the 2023 law that changed how election commissioners are chosen and shielded them from prosecution, and conduct future elections only on rolls that voters can verify. Supporters argue that the burden of proof has been inverted. The State, which maintains the roll, should have to show why a living voter was removed, not the voter to prove they still exist.

The Election Commission has maintained that the revision is a lawful clean-up, that dead and duplicate entries must come off, and that a claims and objections window allows anyone wrongly marked to be restored before the final roll. That assurance is precisely what is now on trial in public. If large numbers of eligible voters discover their status only after the draft is published, the window becomes a second queue, and the queue is longest for those with the least time, documents and help.

Raj is a film actor, and his opponents will say so. But the question he is carrying from district to district is not cinematic. It is clerical and constitutional at once: who deleted whom, on what ground, with what notice, and with what remedy before election day. Until the Commission answers that question booth by booth, the call to hit the streets will keep finding an audience that has already been to the booth and found its name missing.