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Snapshot of the day
September 30, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.
Nineteen opposition parties under the umbrella of the INDIA bloc gathered in Delhi today to discuss their next steps vis-a-vis the special intensive revision – they’ve decided to hold ‘Save Democracy marches’ at the district level starting this Friday and organise a march of ‘all opposition MPs’ to Nirvachan Sadan next week. Congress president and Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge in his opening remarks at the meeting – which took place in the wake of the Indian Express's expose on the Election Commission – called on chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign, for pre-SIR voter rolls to be used in future elections, and to replace electronic voting machines with ballots, among other things. The alliance also demanded that SIR-related cases pending before the Supreme Court be heard on an expedited basis.
The EC on Wednesday night removed the controversial SIR declaration it had added to the online Form 6 from its ECINET application portal in states where the revision exercise is over, a week after the Express's Ritika Chopra revealed that a majority of election commissioners were opposed to its addition (with one of them calling it outright illegal). The declaration remains on the portal in states where SIR is still underway.
Form 7 – through which deletions to a voter roll are filed – is producing its own curiosities. The Hindu found that booth-level agents in Delhi were able to exceed the EC’s limit of 10 applications a day by submitting deletion requests through ECINET, because the portal does not identify them as BLAs and therefore does not enforce the cap. In other words, the safeguard exists in the guidelines; the Election Commission’s own software apparently does not know about it.
Then there is Form 8. Six members of one family in Goa were struck off the electoral roll despite having submitted the form to update their address within the same constituency. The Bombay high court on Tuesday slammed the ECI over the deletion of six members of a family from the electoral rolls in Goa’s Santa Cruz constituency, despite submitting form 8 to update their address during the SIR. Paresh Salgoankar, the petitioner, told a division bench that his family had shifted to another residence within the same constituency and had submitted form 8 to notify the authorities of the same. However,
