'Two kinds of voters': Prakash Raj says the roll revision is dividing citizens by their right to vote

Actor and activist Prakash Raj has warned that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is turning a right into a filter, telling an SIR resistance meeting at Dr BR Ambedkar Circle in Vijayapura on October 5 that he would not allow Karnataka to become another West Bengal and that no voter in the State should be deprived of the vote. What has been removed is not merely a number, he said. They are human beings, citizens of this country and voters.

According to reports of the meeting, Prakash Raj alleged that crores of voters, particularly from weaker and marginalised sections, had been excluded from the rolls. He accused the Election Commission of effectively killing people who are alive through the SIR process, and further accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of acting at the behest of the Union government. He alleged that the ruling establishment was attempting to divide citizens into those who vote for it and those who do not, and said mistakes in the exercise were now coming to light. Comparing alleged deletions with the destruction of evidence in a crime, he said wrongdoing might escape notice while it happens but be exposed when evidence is erased.

The Vijayapura intervention follows his October 3 press conference in Hyderabad, where he demanded that SIR be scrapped and the voters list restored to its previous form by undoing what he described as 13 crore deletions. He also demanded that the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023 be reverted and that judicial immunity granted to the Chief Election Commissioner be undone. At that briefing he cited an investigation he said he carried out in 100 booths across 23 districts of Karnataka, which he said revealed a large number of voters arbitrarily deleted from the rolls. Those figures remain his claims, not independently verified counts.

The Election Commission has consistently described SIR as a clean-up intended to remove duplicate, deceased and ineligible entries, and has directed officials to register voters who were omitted. That official position now sits alongside a widening street argument: opposition parties, youth groups and civil society activists say the burden of proving citizenship has been shifted onto precisely those least able to carry it, including the poor, migrant workers and minorities. Prakash Raj framed the dispute in those terms. This is not merely a struggle for the right to vote, he said. There is an attempt to destroy Indian democracy and the Constitution.

Whether the courts, the Commission or the street settles the argument, the test on polling day will be simpler. A voter who arrives with a lifetime of residence and finds no name on the list will not experience the revision as an administrative improvement. The roll is the state's signed promise that the citizen counts. Every disputed deletion puts that promise on trial.