By Suresh Unnithan
As India’s vast electoral machinery grinds under the weight of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists, a grim narrative unfolds far from the polished corridors of the Election Commission of India (ECI). What was billed as a meticulous housekeeping exercise to purify the nation’s electoral rolls has devolved into a harrowing ordeal for the unsung heroes at the grassroots: the Booth Level Officers (BLOs). These overworked civil servants—often schoolteachers, anganwadi workers, and junior revenue staff—are being pushed to the brink, with tragic consequences that expose the ECI’s callous disregard for human life. Reports of suicides, heart attacks, and mass protests ripple across states like Kerala, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, painting a picture not of democratic renewal but of institutional arrogance and partisan maneuvering. At its core, this rushed revision reeks of an ECI desperate to appease the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), sacrificing the very officials who keep India’s democracy afloat to engineer electoral advantages ahead of crucial polls.
The SIR, launched on November 4, 2025, across nine states and three Union Territories, promises to excise duplicates, ghosts, and inaccuracies from voter rolls while enrolling the young and the overlooked. The ECI touts it as essential preparation for the 2027-28 state assembly elections and the 2029 Lok Sabha battle, citing demographic shifts since the last summary revision in 2021-22. Yet, this ostensibly noble pursuit demands what no reasonable administrator would: compressing a process that historically spans 18 to 36 months into a frantic 90-day sprint ending December 4, 2025. BLOs, numbering over 10 lakh nationwide, are each saddled with 1,000 to 1,500 electors across sprawling rural and urban terrains, compelled to traverse dusty lanes and high-rise clusters multiple times—up to three visits per household—to distribute forms, snap photos, verify Aadhaar-linked details, and upload everything via glitch-prone apps like ERONET and the BLO portal. In regions plagued by spotty internet, this means BLOs trekking miles to cyber cafes or burning personal data packs late into the night, all while juggling their primary duties, such as teaching classes or managing village administration. The ECI’s insistence on real-time digitization, coupled with draconian daily quotas of 50 to 100 forms and mandatory evening scrutiny meetings, has transformed routine fieldwork into a Sisyphean labor, where failure invites threats of suspension or FIRs for “negligence,” as seen in Noida’s aggressive crackdowns.
But the true horror lies in the human toll, a cascade of despair that the ECI dismisses as “isolated incidents” amid a “larger picture of commitment.” Consider the case of Aneesh George, a 41-year-old school attendant in Kerala’s Kannur district, whose body was discovered hanging in his Ettukudukka home on November 16, 2025. Aneesh, doubling as a BLO for the SIR, had toiled until 2 a.m. the previous night, wrestling with enumeration forms for over 1,200 voters in a panchayat riddled with absentee migrants and uncooperative households. His family recounted how he returned home each evening shattered, haunted by superiors’ midnight calls demanding uploads and berating him for delays caused by Kerala’s monsoon-slicked roads and power outages. “He was not built for this—pushing papers into dawn while his own children waited for bedtime stories,” his wife lamented to local media, as unions like the Kerala NGO Association and the Joint Committee of Teacher Service Organisations mobilized a statewide boycott on November 17. The ripple effect was immediate: over 25,000 BLOs downed tools, halting the revision in its tracks and forcing the state government to plead with the ECI for a postponement, a plea rooted in the overlap with local body polls that already strain resources. Congress leader Rijil Makkutty didn’t mince words, accusing the ECI of wielding SIR as a BJP ploy to infiltrate Kerala’s Left stronghold, claiming Aneesh was “a victim of cruel implementation designed to let the saffron party open its account.”
This tragedy in Kerala is no outlier; it is emblematic of a national epidemic. In Rajasthan, which ironically leads the SIR pack with the highest voter mapping rates, the pressure cooker exploded with the suicides of two BLOs within days. Mukesh Jangid, a 45-year-old government school teacher in Jaipur, flung himself before a train on November 13, leaving behind a note scrawled in desperation: “The SIR targets are killing me faster than any lesson plan ever could.” His booth covered Jaipur’s labyrinthine slums, where verifying nomadic voters meant dodging traffic and evading harassment, all under the shadow of a chief electoral officer who boasted of “gigantic task completion” while ignoring pleas for relief. Days later, in Sawai Madhopur, Hariom Bairwa, another teacher-BLO, succumbed to a cardiac arrest during a late-night data entry session, his relatives pointing fingers at “mental torture” from district officials who docked pay for unmet quotas. Rajasthan’s Chief Electoral Officer, Naveen Mahajan, brushed it off as “disheartening but isolated,” even as protests erupted in Jaipur, with BLOs chanting that the ECI’s “success” was built on their graves. By November 22, the state had tallied three such deaths, fueling demands for an independent probe into how the ECI’s accelerated timelines—pushed, critics say, to preempt opposition strongholds—exacerbated vulnerabilities in a state where BLOs earn a meager Rs 12,000 annually, plus a one-time SIR incentive of Rs 6,000 that barely covers travel.
West Bengal, a BJP battleground where the Trinamool Congress (TMC) holds sway, has borne the brunt, with at least nine BLO deaths, including six suicides, since SIR’s inception. Rinku Tarafdar, a para-teacher in Nadia’s Krishnanagar on November 22, left a two-page suicide note excoriating the ECI: “I want to live. My family lacks nothing. But for this modest job, they pushed me to such humiliation that I was left with no choice but to die.” Rinku’s booth spanned flood-prone villages where internet blackouts forced her to bicycle 10 kilometers nightly for uploads, her frail frame buckling under threats of show-cause notices—like the seven slapped on Beliaghata BLOs for digitization lapses. Just days earlier, on November 19, Shanti Mani, an anganwadi worker in Jalpaiguri’s Mal block, ingested poison after a supervisor’s tirade over incomplete forms; her husband described her evenings as “mentally devastated,” spent hunched over a borrowed laptop amid howling winds. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, in a fiery letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on November 21, decried the “inhuman working conditions” that claimed 28 lives statewide, branding SIR “silent, invisible rigging” orchestrated by the BJP to instill voter fear and delete TMC-leaning names en masse. The TMC’s campaign intensified with rallies in Kolkata, where BLOs scuffled with police outside the CEO’s office, demanding an end to what they call a “death sentence disguised as duty.”
Echoes of this anguish resound in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and beyond. In Gujarat’s Gir Somnath, Arvind Vadhere, a 44-year-old teacher from Chhara village, hanged himself on November 20, his note invoking the “unbearable SIR workload” that clashed with school exams, leaving colleagues to cover his classes amid their own exhaustion. Madhya Pradesh mourned Ramakant Pandey and Sitaram Gond, both teachers who collapsed on November 21 while poring over voter lists in Raisen and Damoh—Pandey’s wife, Rekha, tearfully recounting his final words about “voter list duties breaking my spirit.” In Tamil Nadu’s Kallakurichi, a 38-year-old village assistant in Sivanarthangal ended her life on November 19, her family and AIADMK protesters railing against DMK-orchestrated pressures that mirrored the ECI’s national playbook. Uttar Pradesh saw Noida authorities file FIRs against “negligent” BLOs even as suicides mounted, while Bihar’s opposition cried foul over 50,000 voter deletions per INDIA bloc stronghold, allegedly to tilt the scales for the NDA. Rahul Gandhi, on November 23, lambasted SIR as “imposed tyranny,” citing 16 BLO deaths in three weeks as “collateral damage” in the BJP’s quest for unchallenged dominance.
These case studies are not mere footnotes; they indict an ECI steeped in controversy, its actions increasingly synonymous with favoritism toward the ruling BJP. Since 2024, the Commission has weathered a torrent of accusations for undermining electoral integrity, from delaying voter turnout data to shielding Modi’s inflammatory speeches while swift on opposition slips. In the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi exposed over 100,000 fake entries in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura segment, where duplicate voter IDs—some featuring a Brazilian model’s photo—allegedly handed the BJP a win by 114,000 votes, part of a broader “industrial-scale rigging” that cost the Congress 48 seats nationwide. Similar anomalies plagued Haryana’s 2024 assembly elections, with Gandhi alleging the theft of 25 lakh votes through 5.21 lakh duplicates and bulk entries, enabling BJP to snatch victory from an opposition surge. Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh followed suit, where ECI verdicts on party splits favored BJP-aligned factions, and electoral bonds funneled 55% of opaque funds to the ruling party, a scheme the Supreme Court later invalidated but not before it greased the NDA’s 2024 machinery.
The SIR frenzy amplifies this bias, timed suspiciously before Bihar’s polls where Akhilesh Yadav warns of disenfranchising Muslim and Dalit voters—traditional INDIA bulwarks—in a bid to “deprive the majority of their right to elect.” Opposition protests, from TMC’s anti-SIR rallies to Congress’s “Vote Chori” campaign, portray the ECI as a BJP enabler, rushing revisions to purge “illegitimate” names while ignoring forged forms and coerced uploads. The Commission’s opacity—refusing machine-readable rolls, limiting CCTV access, and rebuffing pleas for extensions—fuels the fire, as does its haughty retorts, like questioning how duplicates could favor the BJP if they voted Congress. Yet, in Bihar’s November 2025 results, the NDA’s sweep validated opposition fears: a “hurried SIR” blamed for flipping seats, with BJP crowing that voters rejected “lies” while conveniently overlooking the 79 seats a cleaner 2024 count might have yielded to rivals, per Vote for Democracy analyses.
This is no accident; it’s a pattern of an ECI that once symbolized impartiality now eroded by political capture. The 2024 Chandigarh mayoral farce, where a BJP councillor defaced opposition ballots on camera, set the tone, emblematic of a body that issues bland advisories for Modi’s communal barbs but pounces on Rahul Gandhi’s retorts. Trust in the ECI has plummeted—from 89% in 2019 to a dismal 69% in 2025 CSDS surveys—with Uttar Pradesh’s no-confidence rate tripling to 31%. BLOs, the democracy’s foot soldiers, are mere pawns in this game, their suicides a stark rebuke to an institution that preaches “one nation, one vote” while engineering the opposite.
The ECI must confront its complicity: extend SIR by 18 months, scrap punitive quotas, reimburse digital costs with a dignified Rs 50,000 honorarium, and empanel BLO unions in oversight. A judicial inquiry into these deaths and deletions is non-negotiable, as is transparent audits to purge partisan taint. Until then, SIR stands not for Special Intensive Revision but for a Special Instance of Rigging—a ego-driven farce that mocks India’s 1.4 billion aspirations. The BLOs knocking on doors aren’t just collecting forms; they’re pleading for a democracy that values lives over ledger lines. Will the ECI listen, or continue its descent into irrelevance, dragging the world’s largest democracy down with it?
