I have my vote in Mahadevapura constituency in Bengaluru.
And like the average Indian who has spent a lifetime collecting, photocopying, attesting (self-attesting now), laminating, scanning, uploading, re-uploading and then still being told “sir, one document is missing”, I approached the ongoing SIR exercise with the enthusiasm of a goat being walked past a butcher shop.
Government procedures scare me. Not because I am trying to hide anything. Not because I am not sincere. Not because I don’t keep my papers properly. They scare me because no matter how much I try, there is always something wrong.
One document will have Aditya Nataraja. Another will have Aditya Nataraj. One will have initials. One will not.
One will have the full address. One will have the old address.
One will have the right date of birth. One will have the right date of birth in the wrong format.
One will have my father’s name expanded. Another will have it compressed into a mysterious government-approved acronym.
The great Indian paperwork circus
For decades, these systems did not talk to each other. Aadhaar lived in one swanky building with cameras. PAN lived in another under stacks of paper. Voter ID was more of a cyclostyle machine that sat under a banyan tree. Birth certificate had gone on pilgrimage. Passport was somewhere in Chanakyapuri wearing a blazer. Nobody knew who had said what, where, or why.
Now suddenly everything talks to everything, which is a double-edged sword when your systems are outdated.
Aadhaar must match PAN. PAN must match voter ID. Voter ID must match passport. Passport must match birth certificate. Birth certificate must match school certificate. School certificate must match your blood report. Blood report must match your stool sample.
By the way, if the last thing is not true go to your doctor now. SIR can wait. You, sir, cannot.
And if one letter has gone missing somewhere in 1998 because some overworked clerk was eating mixture with one hand and typing with the other, you are now expected to fix your existence.
My problem is not that I have to do this.
I can still do it from the comfort of my air-conditioned home, sitting on my recliner, with high-speed internet, a laptop, a scanner app, WhatsApp, Google Drive folders and enough English to decode government portals designed by people who clearly hate humanity. Even when it is irritating and scary, I know I am privileged. It is that terrible cringe line: better to cry in a Mercedes than in a Maruti 800. Except in this case, I am crying in broadband. Many others are crying outside a government office.
My real angst is my parents.
Does voting for 50 years not count?
Both are 70+. Both have voted for more than 50 years. Both are among the most meticulous people I know when it comes to documents. They belong to that generation that still keeps electricity bills from 1994 because “you never know when it will be needed.”
And yet, the online SIR process has come with unbridled anxiety for them.
My mother’s name refused to match with the voter card. The system simply would not move ahead without a correction. Yes, there is a form to submit with the corrections. But can anyone assure me that it won’t derail the process? Nope. It is that uncertainty that creates anxiety.
My own name in the 2002 SIR list was printed as Aditya Nataraj, not Aditya Nataraja. For nearly 25 years, this did not matter. I voted. Nobody stopped me. Democracy survived the missing “a”. Now suddenly, every alphabet has become a border checkpoint.
Read More: Confusing forms, tight deadlines: Inside the flawed SIR process
In my case, it did not create a problem. In my mother’s case, it did. And this is exactly how bureaucracy works in India. It does not fail everyone equally. It picks one person in the family and slowly roasts them over low flame.
I was sitting remotely, trying to help my parents through the process. At some point, it became impossible. So, I told them to approach the BLO and get it done in person.
And I could feel their nervousness.
Imagine this.
You have voted for five decades. You have stood in queues. You have dipped your finger in ink. You have watched governments come and go. You have done your bit as a citizen quietly, faithfully, without drama. Then one day, someone arrives with a form and tells you that unless your current existence can be linked to some old record from 2002, your place on the voter list may become doubtful.
The right that was yours as an adult begins to feel like an intern up for probationary review.
This is not how citizenship should feel.
This is not how voting should feel.
This is guilty until proven documented.
And here is where the absurdity becomes unbearable.
Flawed systems
When a bank has to give me a loan of even ₹1 lakh, my credit database has a better biography of me than some members of my own family. My CIBIL report knows all the loans I took, all the credit cards I held, all the enquiries made on me, all the accounts closed, all the accounts open, my repayment history, my dates, my defaults, my delays, and every address I have lived in from the time I first entered the formal credit system.
The financial system knows where I lived in 2008, 2012, 2017, 2020 and last Thursday. If I miss an EMI, recovery agents will not need my grandfather’s 2002 voter details to locate me. They will find me. Magically. Spiritually. Algorithmically. They will turn up at the correct address with the confidence of a homing pigeon trained by capitalism. When you want to lend money, the system somehow knows everything.
When you want to recover money, the system becomes Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Byomkesh Bakshi rolled into one. But when the system has to protect my right to vote, suddenly the system becomes a confused uncle at a Xerox shop.
“Where was your father registered in 2002?”
“Which district?”
“Which taluk?”
“Which village?”
“Which form?”
“Which spelling?”
“Which version of your name?”
“Are you alive?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have children?”
“Do you have a bank account?”
“Please prove the colour of your hair and the length of your toenail.”
Moral failures of the SIR exercise
For a loan, a self-attested piece of paper with my name and address can become part of a credit trail.
For a vote, which is not a favour being given to me but a continuing right I already had, I am being pushed into proving myself all over again.
And please do not tell me that the banking system is casual. Banks panic when NPAs cross a few percentage points. The entire financial system starts discussing stress, risk, provisioning, recovery, asset quality and systemic danger. Even a 3% bad-loan problem is treated like a serious warning light.
Meaning: if 97% of loans are behaving, the system is still considered to require tight monitoring.
Here we are talking about the right to vote. The right to play my role as a citizen. The right that gives me some tiny say in who governs me, taxes me, polices me, regulates me and lectures me on national duty.
And somehow this right is being administered through a system less user-friendly than a personal loan app.
I am not saying use CIBIL for voter rolls. Please do not start a new monster where banks, Aadhaar, voter ID, PAN, passport, mobile number, electricity bill, grocery bill and dental X-ray all merge into one giant surveillance biryani.
My point is simpler. When the state and the financial system want to track citizens for money, they build continuity. When citizens need the state to protect their vote, they get discontinuity. That is the moral failure.
A voter roll should be like a bank passbook.
Updated regularly.
Every entry reflected.
Every change recorded.
Every correction made in time.
Every address change captured.
Every death updated.
Every new voter added.
Every duplicate removed through a transparent process.
It should not be like opening a sealed trunk after 25 years and saying: “Please produce your father’s voter details from the era when Nokia phones were luxury items and cyber cafes charged by the hour.”
SIR should not be a silver jubilee anniversary activity.
Every day people are born.
Every day people die.
Every day people migrate.
Every day women change surnames after marriage.
Every day addresses change.
Every day names are misspelled by clerks, schools, banks, hospitals and government offices.
Electoral roll maintenance should be daily housekeeping, not once-in-a-generation demolition work.
And this is not just my personal frustration.
Across Karnataka, reports have already spoken of online SIR attempts getting stuck because of exact-match issues between Aadhaar and voter records. Spelling differences. Surname changes. Initials. Address formats. Date formats. The ordinary small mismatches of Indian life.
In Bengaluru and elsewhere, BLOs are reportedly under pressure to cover hundreds of homes. Some reports say house-to-house verification is being replaced by mass camps in some places, despite instructions that BLOs must actually visit homes. This is exactly how a process meant to protect voters becomes a process that exhausts voters.
The BLOs and officers who visited my parents’ home apparently had very little clarity. They said they were school teachers and, apart from some basic training, did not really know the details of what had to be done. They gave the forms, scribbled a mobile number on top and left.
That number goes unanswered.
Marginalised communities most affected
Now imagine being 70+, holding a form you do not fully understand, dealing with a phone number that does not respond, and wondering whether the vote you have exercised for half a century is about to vanish because one document says Lakshmi and another says Laxmi.
That is not verification. We are not validating databases. Nobody does it this way. Go and ask any DBA analyst worth their salt. No, SIR.
That is state-sponsored exclusion-induced anxiety.
And this is my family, which is educated, urban, document-conscious and relatively privileged.
Now extend this to the people who will be hit hardest.
Migrant workers. Daily wage labourers. Domestic workers. Tribals and Adivasis. Scheduled Castes. Muslim families in border districts. Women who moved after marriage. People whose parents never had neat documents. Those whose names were written differently in different languages. Those who cannot afford to lose a day’s wage to stand in a queue. People who do not have children sitting in another city with laptops and Wi-Fi trying to decode portals for them.
What happens to them?
Their names may disappear from the rolls, and the most frightening part is that many may not even know it has happened. One day the draft roll will come. Then the final roll will come. Then elections will come. Then someone will reach the booth and discover that democracy has quietly checked out of their life.
We have already seen how big this can become. In Bihar’s SIR exercise, lakhs and lakhs of names were removed from the rolls. Some may have been genuine deletions: deaths, migrations, duplicate entries. Nobody is saying electoral rolls should be frozen in time like a family photo from 1985. But when deletions happen at that scale, the process itself needs extraordinary transparency, empathy and safeguards. Because for the system, one wrongly deleted voter is a data correction issue.
For the citizen, it is civic death.
In Maharashtra, reports have spoken of voters being asked to trace parental voter details from the old 2002 rolls. Think about that for a second. People who have lived and voted in one state for decades are now being asked to prove lineage through an archival list.
Read More: SIR for Karnataka voters: All you need to know about enumeration
For the well-off, this is irritation. For the vulnerable, this is psychological war. And then comes the citizenship confusion. A passport, we are now told, is only a travel document and not conclusive proof of citizenship. Aadhaar is not citizenship proof. Voter ID is not citizenship proof. PAN is not citizenship proof. Ration card is not citizenship proof. Driving licence is not citizenship proof.
Fair enough. Each document has its own legal purpose.
But then please tell the ordinary citizen one simple thing:
What exactly is the document that proves I belong to the country I was born in, grew up in, paid taxes in, voted in and argued about cricket in?
If a passport issued by the Government of India is not enough, if a voter ID issued by the Election Commission is not enough, if Aadhaar linked to every possible corner of your life is not enough, then who the hell is a citizen? This is citizen hell.
This is where SIR starts feeling less like voter-roll correction and probably something more.
The suspense builds because the state doesn’t.
The state has had 25 years to keep records clean. The state had all the data. The state had everything at its disposal – departments, budgets, officers, software vendors, consultants, portals, dashboards, acronyms and committees.
But when the system is messy, the citizen is asked to prove he is not the mess.
This is the part that bothers me. Not the idea of verification. The presumption behind it. A person who has been on the voter list for decades should not be treated as a suspect entry by default. The starting point should be inclusion, not exclusion. The system should bend over backwards to protect the voter, not make the voter run from counter to counter to protect himself from the system.
Clean electoral rolls strengthen democracy. No argument there.
Dead voters must be removed. Duplicate entries must be corrected. Shifted voters must update their details. New voters must be added. Electoral rolls should be accurate. But a clean roll achieved by terrifying genuine voters is not democracy. It is just using another process to implement the laws (CAA/ NRC/ NPR) the government had to roll back. Aap chronology samjhiye.
Today it may hurt one group. Tomorrow it may hurt another. Today your political enemy may be anxious. Tomorrow your parents may be standing in line with a misspelled surname and a BLO who does not pick up the phone.
A democracy is defined by how it treats the old woman with shaky hands, the migrant worker on a construction site, the widow without her husband’s old voter card, the tribal family whose records are scattered across offices, the married woman whose surname changed, the Muslim family afraid that one spelling error will become an accusation, and the poor man who cannot afford to spend three days proving what should have been presumed.
I will get my SIR done. I will fill the form. I will search the 2002 list. I will upload what needs to be uploaded. I will call whoever needs to be called. I will do the dance because I still can.
But my question is not about me. My question is: what happens to those who cannot dance?
What happens to those who do not have the documents, the English, the internet, the time, the money, the confidence or the children to fight the portal?
What happens to citizens who have only one thing to show for their citizenship: that they have lived here, worked here, paid here, suffered here, voted here and belonged here?
We call ourselves the largest democracy in the world, right? Tell me what is the basis for such a statement? The length of our written constitution? That is definitely one of the feathers on our cap. The voter list, my friends. Every election we conduct in this country, not just Lok Sabha but even Legislative Assembly elections, is a matter of insane logistics and execution. BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera carry reports of these elections. Not just because we are the largest, but because despite our size, we conduct these elections fairly and it is a moment of real inclusion, not symbolic inclusion, where democracy briefly meets humanity. And the voter list is that document that defines the starting point of people governing themselves. That is why it is important.
And before we delete a name from that list, we should be very, very sure that we are not deleting a citizen from humanity’s biggest self-governing experiment.