Phase III is rolling out in the most politically relevant states with the baggage of what happened in Bengal.

On Thursday, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the third phase of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls which will be conducted in 16 states and three union territories including Delhi and Maharashtra from May 30. Administratively, this is a paper change. It's actually an extension of the most controversial Democracy Management show ever witnessed in India for decades.

By the end of Phase III, the total number of votes covered will reach almost close to the entire country's 99-crore electorate (excluding Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh which are yet to be scheduled). Election Commission states that it is not feasible to roll them out simultaneously in those three regions due to the snow-bound terrain and ongoing Census house-listing exercise. A sensible reason, except that, by now, the SIR has cargo that none of the bureaucratic rationales can readily explain.

The figures are truly enormous. In the first two phases in 13 states and union territories, more than 59 crore electors were covered with the involvement of more than 6.3 lakh BLOs and 9.2 lakh BLAgents. In case of Phase III only, more than 3.94 lakh BLOs will reach the door-step of 36.73 crore electors. Most of the Phase III states are expected to finish their electoral rolls between September and October 2026. A logical solution in terms of logistics, but one that also means the same machine is powering two of the nation's most sensitive data exercises at the same time: The exercise is being conducted in conjunction with Census house-listing work.

Everything that led up to this makes it a story and not just a scheduling notice.

Announced nationwide in October 2025 by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the SIR is based on Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act. The reason cited was fourfold: voters were being displaced due to the rapid urbanisation, there was a mismatch between voters' location and the voters' list, ghost entries due to reported deaths and foreign nationals, mainly from Bangladesh, who had secured voter cards based on false documentation. Real issues. The electoral lists in India have always contained duplicates, the names of deceased persons and names of persons who have shifted addresses. No one in their right mind doubts that there is a need to clean electoral rolls regularly.

However, the way the cleaning was done, especially in West Bengal ahead of its 2026 assembly elections, made it a political talking point and one that is now inextricably linked to the broader SIR saga.

About 91 lakh voters had been deducted from West Bengal's voter lists since October 2025 and around 2.04 crore names were deducted from Uttar Pradesh's voter lists. In the nine states for which official data was available for Phase II, there was a total decrease of 10.2% in electoral rolls. A total of over 60 lakh deceased voters were deleted across the country, of which the state of Uttar Pradesh had the highest number of 25.47 lakh and West Bengal had the next highest number of 24.16 lakh. A total of 63.16 lakh names were deleted after objections in the adjudication process.

These are the ECI's own numbers, which are listed as national and regional figures. They are not small.

The controversy was not about whether or not it was deleted, it was about who was deleted. Analysis by SABAR Institute found that of the names removed from the voter lists in West Bengal, 34 per cent were Muslims, who constitute 27 per cent of the state's population. The difference between those two numbers, seven percentage points, is the key empirical skirmish in this whole enterprise. The number of voters deleted was maximum in Murshidabad (4.6 lakh), followed by North 24 Parganas (3.3 lakh) and Malda (2.4 lakh), all of which are districts with huge Muslim population and electoral weightage.

Al Jazeera has been in touch with almost a dozen Muslim families in North 24 Parganas whose names were struck off, while many others faced problems due to spelling errors, name changes following marriage, or a mismatch in the names on their Aadhaar and voter cards. According to the Election Commission, the SIR demanded voters to identify the "legacy linkage" – the name of themselves or their parents in the electoral roll of 2002-2003. For those whose names appeared on the 2002 voter list, no further documentation was needed. For those who were not matched up to that baseline, including legitimate voters who had registered for the first time since 2002, there was no burden of proof placed on the government, but rather on the voter.

It's not an administrative oversight, it's a big structural choice.

Imran Hossain, a government employee, worked around the clock, sometimes late into the night, in his village verifying voters' documents and entering data into official systems for the revision exercise, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Upon the final list's publication, he noticed the names of hundreds of confirmed voters – including his own name – were missing. His case is now a symbol of a larger pattern, on which the Commission has not explained itself well, critics say.

Opposition parties such as the Indian National Congress, Trinamool Congress, Communist Party of India (Marxist), Samajwadi Party, DMK and RJD have taken a united stand against the exercise, claiming that the ECI was working in a manner that was "biased" in favour of the ruling BJP ahead of assembly elections. The TMC has submitted an impeachment motion against the Chief Election Commissioner in Parliament. For its part, the BJP has insisted the SIR was deleting ghost names and illegal Bangladeshi immigrants and that any opposition to the exercise was an attack on the voter fraud.

There have been several unnatural deaths and suicides, especially in the Matua community (Hindu refugees from Bangladesh), who were allegedly fearful the SIR would be used to challenge their Indian citizenship. BJP leaders tried to assuage those fears, assuring them that there was a protective pathway in the Citizenship Amendment Act, but that does not seem to have abated ground-level anxiety.

Now, as Phase III makes its rounds in Delhi and Maharashtra—two states which contribute vast political and economic value, Bengal's questions are poised to be repeated in much bigger rooms.

Punjab Congress chief has already protested and asked, why the SIR is being held near Punjab's elections, and cautioned against the kind of situation that happened in Bihar and Bengal. Also, Punjab has a qualifying date of October 1, 2026, for Phase III which critics argue is too short a timeframe before the revision and before an electoral exercise can take place in the state.

What's to be watched is the presence of Delhi. The capital has seen a huge change in its population over the last decade due to big numbers of migrants from other parts of the country, and a history of disputed electoral lists. In Maharashtra, which is also plagued by a multi-party system and has a significant migrant population in urban areas like Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur, the situation is similar. It has stated that no polling station would be allowed to have more than 1,200 electors and that new polling centres would be established in high-rise buildings, gated colonies and slum clusters – which implicitly concedes that the initial stages didn't account for India's residential diversity in urban areas.

This exercise has an economic aspect that is not usually talked about, but is worth considering. The informal sector in India, said to employ about 90% of the population, has a large number of workers who live in rented houses and move frequently, and sometimes do not update their records with government bodies for years. SIR's legacy linkage requirement is an effective mobility tax. However, it remains to be seen how a migrant labourer, who shifted from Bihar to Delhi in 2008 and has been a Delhi voter since 2010, will be able to link his enrolment to a roll in Bihar, which was made in 2002. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) 2023-24, between 5.5 crore and 6 crore workers are involved in interstate migration at a particular point in time. The documentation system of the SIR has not been developed for that population.

The exercise makes people think uncomfortable thoughts around the world. The practice of voter roll purification in the United States, especially in Georgia and other southern states before elections has been questioned in court on the basis that it has a discriminatory effect even if its purpose is officially nondiscriminatory. In those cases, the test used was not intent, but effect: did the purge disproportionately take voters away from identifiable communities? At the very least that is a question that the data in West Bengal should raise for India.

The Election Commission believes that Phase III is a big administrative initiative to give greater credibility to the democratic structure in India, making the electoral rolls accurate, inclusive and transparent, especially in such a rapidly changing and urbanizing country where large-scale verification is necessary to cleanse the voter database. The argument itself isn't incorrect. With India's 99-crore electorate being the largest in the world, preserving its sanctity is a true institutional responsibility.

There is integrity on both sides. A voter accidentally invalidates makes a loss irreparable after the poll day. The Supreme Court, which intervened in the Bengal process, had declared that any wrongful exclusions could be remedied in the future after the elections, a view, which many legal experts had said, was not sufficient as a remedy for the deprivation of one of the fundamental rights of an individual.

Ultimately, West Bengal achieved a record-high voter turnout of approximately 93%, partly due to fears by Muslims and other affected communities that they would further risk losing their right to vote and access to government services if they did not vote. The BJP emerged victorious in the election, the first right-wing party to achieve such a feat in the state, after 15 years of Trinamool Congress led government. But how much the SIR was involved is a subject of bitter debate and the order of events is a matter of record.

Now, Phase III is to be taken to 36 crore more voters. Machinery remains unchanged. The rules are the same. The electoral situation is more charged as Punjab, Delhi and Maharashtra are all in election mode. What has changed, or what has been done, in the design of the exercise so that the problems documented in Bengal are not repeated? The Election Commission has yet to say. It is not so much the schedule as the silence in it that is the real story.