Nagaland Congress questions the status of 1.57 lakh electors left out during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls
DIMAPUR — The Nagaland Pradesh Congress Committee (NPCC) has questioned the status of 1,23,749 electors categorised as Absent, Shifted or Others during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), asking the BJP to explain how many of them are genuinely ineligible to vote and how many may be eligible citizens left out of the draft electoral roll.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the NPCC accused the BJP of dismissing concerns over the revision as political propaganda, following the party's ‘Loktantra Bachao, Bheed Tantra Hatao’ campaign in Dimapur on November 7.
The Congress maintained that the state's own enumeration figures raised questions about the scale of non-coverage during the exercise. Of the 13,57,208 electors on the pre-SIR roll, enumeration forms were collected from 11,99,456, or 88.38%, leaving 1,57,752 entries without forms.
The latter figure comprised 1,23,749 electors categorised as Absent, Shifted or Others, 28,944 identified as deceased and 5,059 marked as duplicate or multiple enrolments, according to figures released by the chief electoral officer (CEO), Nagaland.
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The draft electoral roll published on September 20 contained 12,06,457 electors, including 7,001 service electors—a net reduction of 1,50,751 from the pre-SIR electorate.
The NPCC argued that those categorised as Absent, Shifted or Others could not automatically be treated as illegal or ineligible voters, since the category included people who could not be found, had shifted residence or had failed to submit enumeration forms within the stipulated period.
“The BJP must answer a straightforward question: How many of these 1,23,749 electors are genuinely ineligible, and how many are eligible citizens who have been left out of the draft roll?” the party asked.
According to the party, the BJP's argument that entries flagged for verification were not necessarily deleted did not address the need to ensure that eligible voters were not excluded from the final roll.
The NPCC clarified that it did not oppose the removal of deceased and duplicate entries but said the exercise should not deprive genuine citizens of their right to vote. It called on the Election Commission to ensure that no eligible elector was excluded due to administrative shortcomings or procedural difficulties.