Ichhadhari protestor Yogendra Yadav claims ECI’s voter list revision drive in Bihar should not happen because he does not like it: Here is how he has been on default protest mode for years

Conspiracy theories, lies and mudslinging dominate the political discourse of the anti-BJP parties whenever there are elections in any part of the country. While the political war of words over the imaginary irregularities alleged by the Congress party during Maharashtra elections has yet to water down, the pro-congress ecosystem has floated a fallacious narrative regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls being conducted in poll-bound Bihar.

Yogendra Yadav, the ichhadhari protestor-psephologist-politician-psephologist, has filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking a stay on the ongoing SIR in Bihar calling the review process ‘arbitrary’. Salim aka Yogendra Yadav contends that conducting a de novo revision of the electoral rolls just months before the state elections is unjustified and could disenfranchise ‘vulnerable’ sections of the population.

The PIL emphasises how marginalised groups, including women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (SC/STs), and migrants—many of whom lack legal documentation—may be disproportionately affected by the Special Intensive Revision drive.

“The 90-day verification window, overlapping with Bihar’s monsoon season, is also criticised as impractical given the fact that a large number of these sections of people lack birth certificates, land documents, or other mandated identity proofs,” Yogendra Yadav’s plea states.

Interestingly, the Omidyar-funded NGO, the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), had earlier filed a similar plea before the Supreme Court calling the ECI’s order regarding SIR ‘arbitrary’ and claiming that “millions of voters could be deprived of their right to vote”.

In addition to filing a PIL in the Supreme Court, the Duggal Sahab of political activism, Yogendra Yadav, also wrote an opinion piece in The Indian Express on the 2nd of July, 2025, in which he argued that reviewing electoral rolls would be an attack on the right to vote to insinuate that the SIR exercise is being carried out to disenfranchise a specific section of voters before the assembly elections in Bihar.

Yadav equated the Special Intensive Review to a backdoor National Register of Citizens (NRC). Not to forget, the Islamo-leftists including Yogendra Yadav have long been peddling falsehoods that NRC is the Modi government’s tool to strip Indian Muslims of their citizenship.

Recently, Yadav claimed that while ECI argues that an SIR in Bihar will help weed out illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators from the voter list, it will also remove over 2.5 crore Indian citizens from the electoral roll.

“If there are illegal foreign citizens in Bihar, they are primarily people from Nepal — most of whom are Hindus. This process could remove a few thousand Bangladeshi and tens of thousands of Nepali citizens’ names, but at the same time, there is a risk of approximately 2.5 crore Indian citizens’ names being removed as well. You don’t swing a hammer at your nose to kill a fly,” Yadav said.

However, the Election Commission of India fact-checked Yadav’s claims calling them “baseless and misleading”. The ECI stated that no eligible Indian citizen shall be left out and by the 7th of July 2025, over 2.88 crore people have already submitted their Enumeration Form.

Before this, the ECI fact-checked Congress leader Supriya Srinate’s claim that the right to vote is left to the decision of the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) as “misleading”. The ECI said that while the last date for submitting the filled enumeration form is 25th July, the documents can be submitted during the Claims and Objections Period.

Moreover, while the ERO is the deciding authority, an appeal can be made against the ERO’s order. Thus, there is no question of any foul play in the SIR process to deliberately remove any specific section of people from the electoral roll.

Interestingly, on 8th July, Yogendra Yadav disputed the ECI’s fact-check against his misleading post and challenged the commission to make the list of 2.88 crore voters who have filed their enumeration form, public.

“Here is an open challenge to the @ECISVEEP Will you allow me to fact check the claim (that over 36% of electors had submitted filled Enumeration Forms by 7 July) that you have made in this “Fact check”? I challenge you to make public the list of these names. Besides, you cannot refute my apprehension (of 2.5 cr people being disenfranchised) by citing a principle in EC’s order. My point is that the EC’s order flies in the face of that principle. You cannot refute it by stating any figure of how many have filled the form. That’s besides the point. The issue I raise is whether they have or can fulfiled the documentary requirement set by the ECI order. My apprehension is based on official statistics about the coverage of the 11 certificates demanded by the ECI. Provide counter-evidence, if you have any. Or appoint a new fact checker,” Yadav posted on X.

Apparently, Yogendra Yadav wants the ECI to make names of crores of voters who have submitted their enumeration form public randomly just to make Yogendra Yadav overcome his apprehension. Also, the protestor for hire should answer how can the ECI release the list of names of voters even before completing the verification process.

What is Special Intensive Review and why is the Election Commission undertaking it in Bihar?

Yogendra Yadav and the opposition parties in Bihar, including Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), have dubbed the SIR as a diabolical attempt at ‘votebandi’ (mass disenfranchisement) to target anti-BJP voters, essentially Muslims. This, however, is yet another disgraceful attempt of the opposition and its extended ecosystem to cast aspersions on the integrity of the Election Commission even as the EVM hacking, VVPAT tampering, and additional votes lies to assert that the BJP is misusing the electoral system for its benefit with the connivance of the ECI.

Notably, the last comprehensive SIR in Bihar was conducted in 2003. Contrary to the ‘votebandi’ assertions by the opposition, the SIR is being carried out to address issues like rapid urbanisation, unreported deaths, new voters, the potential inclusion of ineligible foreign nationals, particularly, Rohingya and Bangladeshi infiltrators. These are standard administrative rationales for electoral roll revisions, it does not mean that the ECI is acting with partisan malice.

The SIR is not a de novo exercise scrapping the entire voter list as claimed by Yogendra Yadav. In fact, it is but a revision to verify and update existing rolls. While the opposition is projecting the special review as some sort of deliberate exclusionary purge being carried out in haste ahead of the elections, it is a robust process involving booth-level officers conducting door-to-door verification, assisting voters with form submissions, and taking live photographs to ensure transparency.

The Election Commission started the verification process on 25 June 2025 and it will continue till 26th July. After the exercise is over, a revised and correct voter list will be published on 30th September. As part of the verification process, Booth Level Officers (BLO) are visiting all houses across the constituencies. They carry the forms, which they hand over to the people and ask people to fill in their details, such as names, and addresses and attach some documents. These documents are needed to ensure that the person is eligible to vote.

If a voter’s name is on the voter list of 2003 (when the verification process was last carried out in Bihar), then he or she just has to confirm his/her information. If their parents’ names are on the list, then no additional documents are needed. However, if their parents’ names are not on the old list, then they need to provide some documents, like a birth certificate or any other relevant document.

The ECI has listed 11 admissible documents: Any Identity card/pension Payment Order issued to regular employee/ pensioner of any Central Govt/State Govt/PSU, Any Identity Card/Certificate/Document issued in India by Government/Local Authorities/Banks/ Post Office/LIC/PSU prior to 01.07.1987, Birth Certificate issued by the competent authority, passport, matriculation/ education certificate issued by recognised boards, Permanent Residence certificate issued by competent State Authority, Caste certificate, Forest Right Certificate, NRC (not applicable in Bihar), Family Register, prepared by State/Local authorities, any land/house allotment certificate by government.

While these are the listed admissible documents, the enumeration form has fields wherein the voters can fill in their Aadhaar number and Electronic Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) number as well.

The ECI has also said that voters can challenge the ERO’s decision and also submit documents during the claims and objections period, further mitigating risks of arbitrary deletions.

Notably, the first visit of the Booth Level Officers (BLOs) to nearly 1.5 crore households in Bihar has been completed on July 4. Over 87 per cent of Enumeration Forms, that is 6,86,17,932 forms out of 7,89,69,844 forms have been distributed to voters. The said number of voters are the ones who have been enrolled as on June 24, 2025. The SIR exercise is expected to be completed by September and the final Electoral Roll for the state will be published on September 30, 2025.

Interestingly, on 4th July, INDI Alliance leaders led by RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav met Chief Electoral Officer Vinod Singh Gunjiyal demanding the inclusion of Aadhaar cards, ration cards, and MNREGA job cards as valid and admissible documents. This came even as there have been numerous reported cases of illegal Rohingya and Bangladeshi infiltrators obtaining counterfeit Aadhaar and other conventional ID-proof documents. Perhaps that is the main cause of the opposition’s chagrin.

It is essential to mention that the 2003 voter list has names of 4.96 crore people in Bihar. The Commission said that the people included in the list and their children do not need to provide any special documents.

While considering the socio-economic realities of Bihar, it is indeed true that a significant number of people in Bihar may not have documents other than voter cards, Aadhaar, and ration cards, the ECI’s multi-layered approach — leveraging existing rolls, field support, and post-verification corrections, is meant to accommodate Bihar’s socio-economic realities ensuring that the genuine voters are not excluded from the voter list.

Earlier, former Bihar CM Jitan Ram Manjhi had raised concerns over the presence of up to 20,000 fake voters enrolled in voter lists in some places. While the BJP-led NDA asserts that the SIR would bring transparency in the electoral process and weed out fake voters, the opposition is alleging foul play and claiming that Muslim, Dalit and tribal voters, who they believe are anti-BJP voters would be removed from the elector list.

Yogendra Yadav and his ilk are mindlessly politicising a routine electoral process as a part of their usual fearmongering tactics of ‘Democracy khatre mein’, ‘Samvidhan khatre mein’ etc.

Yogendra Yadav and his anti-BJP activism in the garb of ‘saving democracy’

This is not the first time that Yogendra Yadav has raised questions over the integrity of the Election Commission and the transparency of the electoral process. After the BJP gave a stunning defeat to the Congress party in the Haryana assembly elections last year, the Congress and Yogendra Yadav resorted to blaming the EVMs.

While Congress alleged EVM hacking in favour of the BJP, Yadav tweaked Congress’s allegations on EVMs and claimed it to be a technical issue. He repeated the Congress allegation that EVMs showing more votes had a 99% battery level, and therefore the unspoken allegation is that those EVMs were tampered with after the polls. He said that these are serious allegations, adding that this needs investigation.

Yadav also claimed that he could not understand the ECI response to the allegation because it was ‘too technical’. He said that as he is not an engineer, he does not understand things related to batteries. However, he claimed that this is a serious matter and ECI needs to probe and explain everything. While Yogendra Yadav thought the topic of battery level in devices is so technical that it needs an engineering degree to understand, that is not the reality. In today’s age, everyone uses battery-operated devices, and everyone knows that when fully charged, a device shows 100% charge, and as the battery is drained with use, the displayed charge level continues to come down.

Yadav has long been peddling similar conspiracy theories and lies as a fearmongering tactic right before the elections. In April last year ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Yogendra Yadav quoted an interview of Sonia Gandhi loyalist Jean Dreze and said that “everyone should sit up and take note” when Jean Dreze said that the coming elections are “as good as rigged”.

The opposition and its propaganda machinery began peddling the ‘elections are as good as rigged’ narrative even before the voting simply because the wave did not seem in their favour. However, when the BJP actually missed the majority mark, suddenly the faith of this lot was restored in democracy, the electoral process and some sort of divine justice. In fact, they projected INDI Alliance’s defeat, though less humiliating this time, as their moral victory against the ‘BJP-controlled’ system’. But this restoration of faith in the electoral process was fickle, as the opposition began to conveniently accept the Janadesh in state elections where it won and blame the EVMs, VVPATs, Election Commission and everything under the sun but their own selves for the setbacks.

From Maharashtra to now Bihar, the opposition’s strategy remains to build a narrative that somehow the whole electoral process is rigged in favour of the BJP and yet they are fighting against it. If the anti-BJP alliance wins then they would project it as a triumph against the compromised ‘system’, if not then play the ‘Hum haare nahi hain, hame haraya gaya hai’ victimhood.

Yogendra Yadav, the farmer one day, and the social justice activist on another, has been at the forefront of opposing, protesting and crying hoarse over almost everything the Modi government does since 2014.

Interestingly, Yogendra Yadav had contested the 2014 Lok Sabha election from Gurgaon on Aam Admi Party (AAP) ticket only to lose his security deposit and a year later get kicked out of AAP. After a failed career in politics, Yogendra Yadav returned to psephology only to face embarrassments one after the other.

Be it anti-CAA protests, farmers protest or joining the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s controversial foot march Bharat Jodo Yatra, involvement in the 2020 anti-Hindu Delhi Riots, opposing Waqf Bill and delimitation, among other activities, Yogendra Yadav has been diligently trying to spread anti-Modi and anti-BJP propaganda.

Yogendra Yadav’s political activism directed at challenging every law or reform the Modi government brings, ‘intellectualism’, psephology and now the anti-ECI propaganda are all dedicated to opposing the BJP and ‘Hindutva’. While Yadav has lost relevance among the common people, the leftist media ecosystem and even the judiciary have been entertaining him for years.

Yogendra Yadav has a knack for spinning anti-BJP narratives through speculative framing, exaggerated claims, and twisting facts. In the case of SIR in Bihar, Yadav is pushing the narrative that somehow only those traditionally opposed to the BJP, would be disenfranchised suggesting that his chagrin is not over the possibility of genuine voters losing their voting rights, but anti-BJP voters losing their voting right. It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court heeds Yogendra Yadav’s alarmist narrative or upholds the ECI’s authority.

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