Telangana Congress Has Found One Scheme It Can Implement

Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy says 73.39 lakh Telangana voters — about 21.7 per cent of the electorate — have landed in the “Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate” categories during the Special Intensive Revision. The government says the process risks excluding genuine voters and has sought a four-week extension. That is a serious warning. It is also a remarkable confession: the administration is looking at more than one in five electors and discovering that the state’s voter list has become a group project nobody supervised.

Revanth’s solution is even better. Congress ministers and workers must go door to door, check names and protect voters. The party that runs the government is now being asked to perform the fieldwork that a functioning electoral process should make routine. The citizen is apparently not a citizen until a Congress worker has located them, verified them and possibly remembered which booth they belong to. Democracy, in this version, comes with a party flag and a follow-up call.

The Chief Minister has also alleged that the BJP is using the revision to target Congress supporters, including SC, ST and minority voters. That allegation needs evidence, not merely the familiar political instinct to convert every administrative failure into an enemy operation. But the underlying problem does not disappear because Revanth gives it a partisan costume. If 73.39 lakh entries require urgent protection, the government should be explaining the process, publishing the safeguards and making claims and objections simple. Instead, it is mobilising Congress workers as a parallel election department and calling the panic democratic vigilance.

This is the governing style in miniature. When the machinery works, the government takes the credit. When the machinery alarms the public, the party takes the streets. The same administration that wants applause for defending democracy is asking millions of voters to prove they still exist before 19 October. That is not empowerment. It is bureaucratic abandonment dressed up as political mobilisation.

A government that cannot keep 73 lakh voters visible should be careful before calling the exercise a revision.