The numbers were precise.
The answers to the queries were strikingly similar: “Record not maintained.”
As the controversy over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls puts Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar under scrutiny, an older trail of official correspondence from Indore in Madhya Pradesh raises a pointed question: When voter names are deleted through a digital system, where are the records explaining those decisions? The replies arrived in June. The political backdrop is significant.
An RTI request concerning more than 1.36 lakh voter deletions cited across Indore district between January 5 and October 15, 2022, drew a recurring response from constituency election offices: “The requested digital records relating to the Garud app and ERO Net had not been maintained. The district election office transferred the application to constituency officers on May 27. The Indore-4 officer said the deletion process on Garud and ERO Net was routine work undertaken under Election Commission instructions, but the constituency office had not maintained the related video, DVD or other digital records sought. Kaushal took the matter beyond Indore in a July 31, 2025 complaint to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, and Madhya Pradesh’s Chief Electoral Officer. He raised concerns over the handling of voter-deletion records across all 230 Assembly constituencies. In the 2023 Assembly election, the BJP won 163 seats against the Congress’s 66 and swept all nine constituencies in Indore district.
