BJP explains 13 crore exclusions. The audit trail is missing
The figure covers draft-roll non-inclusions, not proven permanent disenfranchisement. Delhi still has not shown how entries were classified, notified and restored.
The categories have been supplied. The audit trail has not.
More than 13 crore entries were excluded from draft electoral rolls or categorised for non-inclusion during the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision across 30 states and Union territories, according to Election Commission-linked reporting. That is a large number. It is not, on the evidence available, proof that 13 crore eligible voters were permanently disenfranchised. Precision matters, especially when the institution counting the votes is also explaining the count.
The BJP says the figure includes 2.8 crore deceased entries, 6.3 crore people who permanently shifted, 1 crore duplicates and around 3 crore absent or untraceable electors. Those categories are attributed to BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi as a presentation of ECI data, not backed here by a complete, publicly auditable national table. The ECI’s own October 2025 order says probable reasons such as “Absent/Shifted/Death/Duplicate” were to be recorded, displayed and followed by claims, objections, notices and hearings.
That is the part Delhi has not made easy to inspect. The public still lacks a state-wise and category-wise account showing what evidence supported each classification, how many notices were delivered, how many electors were heard, and how many were restored. The ECI order scheduled the claims and hearing process from 9 December 2025 to 31 January 2026, with final publication on 7 February 2026 in the states covered by that order. A route on paper is not the same thing as a remedy that an excluded voter can actually use.
The concern is not invented by opposition politicians. An investigation reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected at least 14 times over 10 months to issues including changes to Form 6, database access and restoration of excluded names. The Supreme Court’s May 2026 Bihar judgment upheld the ECI’s power to conduct SIR but retained the need for notice, inquiry, hearing and reasoned decisions. So the BJP has supplied a category breakdown for the 13 crore figure. It has not supplied the audit trail showing whether the machinery treated voters as citizens or merely as rows to be cleaned. That is not administrative neatness. It is democratic accountability, and Delhi is still hiding behind arithmetic.