Bengaluru's Special Intensive Revision was always going to be messy. No one thought it would turn into a complete showdown between the coalition and the state government in five weeks, but that's where Karnataka is this week. A joint BJP-JD(S) delegation visited the Chief Electoral Officer V. Anbukumar's office on Monday and submitted the memorandum alleging that the state administration was conducting the SIR exercise to death. The Union minister and the JD(S) leader H.D. Kumaraswamy led the delegation, which was accompanied by Union ministers Pralhad Joshi and Shobha Karandlaje, and the two Leaders of Opposition in the Karnataka assembly, R. Ashoka and Chalavadi Narayanaswamy. What they wanted was simple: a probe into the incident, cancellation of all verification that has occurred and a return of all Booth Level Officers to real doorsteps for a new, paper-checked, door-to-door run. They further demanded disciplinary and legal punishment to be inflicted on the official(s)/"Political Functionary" held responsible.

This is not a minority district unit grievance. It is the entire ruling combination at the Centre in its entirety endorsing in writing an allegation that a Congress government in a State is playing upon a constitutional process which is supposed to be above party politics. The language in the memorandum is direct: it states that if not corrected, the exercise will result in a roll that is “unsustainable and unreliable” and it reports that there is already evidence of the violations, which has been shared both on social media and by mainstream media.

What do they claim exactly? When you remove the political theatrics, the grievance is four points that are repeated over and over again. First, BLOs are not going door to door for the households to fill out enumerators forms as per Election Commission's own manual, but are taking voters to group places like community halls, marriage halls and religious places in huge numbers. This has occurred at a marriage hall in Tippu Nagar, Ramanagara, claims JD(S) youth wing chief Nikhil Kumaraswamy. In the N.R. constituency in Mysuru, the voters have complained of being called to public places and not at their homes. Secondly, because Gatherings are coordinated via WhatsApp groups, NDA leaders contend that this turns the household verification process into something closer to a camp style enrolment drive, which is exactly what the SIR was meant to avoid. Third and this is the one with the most communal hue, some of these camps are being organised in mosques, and in Bengaluru's Jayanagar constituency, the enumeration forms in circulation reportedly had pictures of Congress leaders, a charge BJP MLA C.K. Ramamurthy claims he had already raised separately to the Election Commission and Greater Bengaluru Authority. Fourth that a parallel, unofficial SIR-type exercise was being conducted by the Karnataka State Election Commission within Greater Bengaluru Authority's area of jurisdiction, which was clumsily overlaid on the Election Commission of India's (ECI) statewide exercise, creating confusion among the voters, Karandlaje added in her separate charge, while also referring to the increasing irregular issuance of birth certificates from cyber centres, which she had wanted the Chief Election Commissioner to personally review.

Much of this was aired in a previous complaint, filed by BJP state president B.Y. Vijayendra, three days ago, when he said that the Election Commission had responded to his party's claim by conducting a video conference instructing officials to fall in line, but nothing had changed on the ground. Senior BJP leader C.T. Ravi has gone a step ahead and raised the issue of whether the Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar's directive to officials that not a single minority voter should be left out in the electoral lists was matched by the urgency for voters from the majority community, as they have been affected in a similar manner in Chikkamagaluru, where the numbers are around six thousand. It is noteworthy that Shivakumar is only a month in the job. He replaced Siddaramaiah in June 3, after a much-anticipated transfer of leadership within the Congress high command after Siddaramaiah's completion of three years at the helm and declared the beginning of the state's SIR drive as his own action, completing his own form in his residence in Sadashivanagar and calling on every eligible voter to complete his or her own, as a means of safeguarding both the franchise and access to welfare schemes. The optics of that are very new: a chief minister who has been performing a model citizen act in the midst of a week of television channels in the city of Bengaluru playing the split screen game of a Chief Minister who is not the same one who ran the show on ground and is accused of running a subverter campaign.

The magnitude of what is actually being verified needs to be called to mind, for the numbers tell why tempers are so short. As of June 16, there were 5.54 crore registered voters in Karnataka. According to the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) office, only 2.01 crore (just above 36 per cent) of the electorate have been distributed as of July 3, in a window that began June 30 and will close July 29. About 12 lakh of those distributed have been digitised and around 54,800 voters had filed their forms online. Those whose names have so far been marked off on the ground under "absent, shifted, dead, duplicate," are 8,853 who have been confirmed dead; 6,828 permanently shifted out; 1,636 already on the registers at another address; 264 untraceable and a residual 107 under other heads. Those are miniscule amounts on a base of 5.5 crore, but in absolute terms they mean tens of thousands of actual disputes to be decided, each of which could be a flash point if a name is struck off by mistake or, according to the opposition, if a name that should have been struck off is waved through.

All this is not happening in isolation. Karnataka is part of a nationwide exercise which has now been extended to practically every State which has not done so earlier this year. On May 14, the Election Commission announced the launch of Phase III of the SIR, in which 16 states and three Union Territories, including Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Haryana, Jharkhand and Delhi NCT, have already completed the drive while Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan are still in the process. The numbers nationally are mind-boggling: Uttar Pradesh's own SIR retained 12.55 crore of its 15.44 crore registered voters after crores of names were deleted and West Bengal struck off around 91 lakh names. Each of these exercises has led to a similar battle raging in Bengaluru, with opposition parties claiming the poor and migrant were being disenfranchised and ruling parties in each state claiming to be either padding or purging the rolls.

The legal landscape is as significant as the political din. On May 27, a Supreme Court bench presided by Chief Justice Surya Kant rejected arguments that a nationwide review from the scratch is in excess of what is allowed under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act and Article 324 of the Constitution and upheld the constitutional validity of the SIR framework. The court said the Commission's reasons for the exercise rapid urbanisation, unchecked migration, duplicate entries, and the long delay since the last comprehensive revision were enough, but imposed one important condition the Commission can ask questions about citizenship for voting, but it cannot decide on anyone's citizenship; and names of persons whose citizenship it doubts must be sent to the Central government for adjudication under the citizenship law within four weeks. It is this single line that explains the recurrence of the "illegal immigrant" tag, albeit in the language of elections, in the Karnataka complaints, but which ultimately implies a much bigger issue which remains unresolved in the country who counts as a citizen and who decides.

Also there's a very local, very material one that's lying below all this and doesn't get touched in many of the political statements, the civic elections of Bengaluru. The city has not had an elected municipal administration for the past 11 years since the last BBMP elections in 2015, and the Greater Bengaluru Authority, the five city corporations carved out of the old BBMP and the number of wards put up up from 198 to 368, is under a Supreme Court-monitored deadline to hold elections by August. A city whose economy is dominated by technology and services exports, and whose investors and real estate developers have been waiting for more than a decade to have an accountable local government as it has been one of the only cities in India for which infrastructure was never finalised or even frozen in an electoral roll, is about to have its electoral rolls frozen and finalised in the same period as this SIR controversy is playing out. The one which the Election Commission finally clears as clean will govern the fate of a Bengaluru city economy worth keeping an eye on, which is why the turf war over the control of the camps, the form distribution points and the BLO behaviour in the wards has become such an intensely fought affair, and not a routine administrative update.

Subtract the theatre on either side and it's a real tough structural issue that always resurfaces when the EC's sweeping Article 324 powers come face-to-face with the ground-level political machinery of another party (who will supervise the supervisors, and how much should either party trust each other if the entire game is about who gets to vote? For now, the Commission has offered "corrective instructions" and not a new investigation. That will become clear only when the provisional electoral rolls of Karnataka are released and the claims and objections window is opened later this month, once an opposition alliance has already registered its complaint, or a state government has just taken its model-citizen stance on the same issue.