New Delhi: As protests raged in the capital against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) revision of voter lists, Union Home Minister Amit Shah accused Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition, of protecting infiltrators in the garb of accusing the Commission of malice. 

"I want to tell Rahul Gandhi ji that the nation is well aware of your plan to save ghuspaithiyas (infiltrators) and now the people of Bharat are not going to fall for your ploy," he said in an interview on Tuesday.

Amit Shah was quick to impute that among the 13.39 crore voters deleted by ECI were infiltrators that the Congress leader was trying to protect. 

But our investigation into the ECI’s software and the Commission’s response to our Right to Information (RTI) Act applications shows the ECI had no mechanism or process to tag any of the 13.39 crore deleted voters as ‘foreigners’. 

Its software did not provide an option for officials across the states to identify and mark people as foreigners. 

As a consequence, none were found. Over 100 Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) in Bihar responded to our RTI application and confirmed this. 

Bihar was the first state to undergo SIR starting in June 2025. It’s at this stage that ECI loudly claimed that identifying ‘infiltrators’ was one of the primary aims of SIR. 

When SIR was first challenged before the Supreme Court, the ECI reasserted this purpose of the unprecedented voter roll revision. The apex court, taking its word at face value and upholding the SIR, told the Commission that the cases where people have been deleted on the grounds of being ‘not citizens’ must be referred to a competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955. The competent authority here would be the Union Home Ministry under Amit Shah. The court gave the ECI a four-week deadline. 

It is not publicly known if the ECI has submitted any such list to the court. 

Soon after this deadline elapsed, The Collective filed an RTI request with the Election Commission asking whether the ECI had complied with the court’s directions and shared these cases with the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). The ECI had completed the SIR in 13 states and union territories by that time. In our questions, we specifically asked for more details of suspected foreign nationals that the ECI shared with the MHA in Bihar and West Bengal.

Instead of replying to our request, the Commission forwarded our questions to merely one state — Bihar. They said election authorities in Patna would be best suited to answer our questions. We received responses from assembly constituencies in the state; while they gave clear numbers of voters deleted as absent, shifted, dead, and others, missing from their disclosures was any mention of a non-Indian citizen found.

Our investigations into the SIR in Uttar Pradesh finally answered this mystery. Why was the ECI reluctant to disclose to the public or the MHA the voters that it found who were not Indian citizens?

The answer is simple. The ECI never designed its system to mark out foreigners.

Unrecorded Infiltrators 

When the ECI completed enumeration in Bihar in July 2025, the first state to undergo the SIR, it claimed to have detected a large number of foreign nationals during house-to-house verification. 

But when it was time to declare official figures of voters deleted in September, they only revealed the names of absent, shifted and dead voters, not of any foreigners found. 

Our RTI applications across several Bihar constituencies met the same wall; assembly election officials held zero records of non-citizens found.

By the second phase of the SIR in 12 states, internal rules made it clear: booth officers were no longer required to identify or report non-Indian citizens. The Commission specified that all voters who do not return their enumeration forms will be deleted. But it gave its ground workers, the Booth Level Officers, four specific grounds to delete them: absent, shifted, duplicate, or dead.

In its bluster, in the second phase of SIR,  ECI unleashed an algorithm designed to identify these purported infiltrators, targeting voters who failed to trace their names or lineage back to the 2002–2004 electoral rolls. These ‘unmapped’ voters would be called for SIR hearings, and if they failed to produce documents specified by the Commission, they would be deleted. 

This algorithm was deployed months before West Bengal was going to polls. In the run-up to the West Bengal Assembly elections, Home Minister Amit Shah reiterated his plans to ‘detect, delete and deport’ ghuspaithiyas or illegal infiltrators if the BJP came to power in the state. 

We witnessed these SIR hearings in West Bengal, a state where the largest number of voters have been removed through SIR hearings so far. We investigated the election officers' software, ERONET, removing voters first-hand. We found there was no option to mark voters as non-Indians. 

In our investigation in UP, we learnt that election officers must generate a Form 7, a legally mandated form to delete a voter, after deciding to remove voters during SIR hearings. However, these forms were auto-generated and already carried the signature of the election officer. So around 86,000 voters deleted during SIR hearings in UP carry no reasons. 

SIR contained no procedure to detect and delete voters on the grounds of them being non-citizens, but being deleted from the voter rolls carried consequences for people, especially in West Bengal. Soon after winning West Bengal, the BJP leaders in the state cut welfare benefits for those who had been deleted from the SIR. Days before, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari had promised that “no deceased person, illegal infiltrator, or non-Indian individual will be allowed to avail benefits meant for citizens of the state.”

Meanwhile, the Opposition leaders continue to surround the ECI, demanding the disclosure of these purported infiltrators, one of the reasons for which the SIR was initiated in the first place. We now know that the ECI never set out to find them in the first place.