One Sunday evening I returned to my hometown of Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh after my end-semester exam at IIT Kanpur. The air felt uncharacteristically tense.
I soon realised that the anxiety was the result of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision process.
The Election Commission has said that this exercise, which is underway in 12 states and Union Territories, is necessary for accurate, fraud-free elections. In principle, it is a routine exercise, but it has caused anxiety in Barabanki, and, I suppose, other places too.
Our domestic worker said that in her locality, many believe that those who do not receive the SIR form will be sent to Bangladesh. WhatsApp forwards have caused a storm of confusion.
It isn’t just the marginalised who are uncertain about the intentions of the exercise. My mother, a teacher, and my relatives who have good political connections are battling uncertainty too.
For Hindus, this is an inconvenient administrative drill, nothing more than annoying extra paperwork. But for Muslims, the SIR feels like a question mark on their citizenship.
Men and women who have lived in the same homes for more than half a century are suddenly paralysed as they wonder what will come next.
The chronology is clear in their minds.
The SIR follows in the footsteps of a series of measures designed to convey to Muslims that they are second-class citizens of India. It follows the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, which offered fast-track citizenship for refugees from three neighbouring countries, except Muslims. Months before that, the updating of the National Register of Citizens in Assam in August 2019 left 19 lakh people stateless – of them seven lakh are Muslim.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government has promised to enact a Uniform Civil Code that will negate personal laws related to marriage, divorce, adoption and succession for minority communities. The Waqf (Amendment) Act, passed in April, is viewed as a strategy to weaken the Muslim control of customary charitable trusts and properties.
Booth Level Officers, who are in charge of verifying information on the ground, can offer reassurance and clarity about the exercise.
But in some cases, people around me complained that the booth-level officers do not have all the answers. The process seemed to be much like some of the engineering exams I had just appeared for, where the purpose was just to get it done with it, never mind the accuracy of the answers.
Given the immense workload booth-level officers have been handed, they are not at fault.
There are no perfect solutions in this situation but an approach combining transparency, presence and reassurance can help.
The administration must focus on actively reassuring citizens, with clear, visible communication from the mohalla level to the district headquarters. Senior election officials must join Booth Level Officers on the ground, providing the technical clarity that frontline staff often lack, and actively counter the misinformation.
Many of the rumours I encountered were hyperlocal, which makes direct engagement critical. Posters, banners and public notices should clearly signal that the process is routine and not arbitrary. A list of frequently asked questions should be prominently displayed, outlining next steps for every scenario and detailing the channels available for grievance redressal. Elected representatives should step up to address the trust deficit in their constituencies.
The Special Intensive Revision exercise gives citizens a chance to correct errors, misspelled names and outdated addresses. With India moving towards full digitization, these corrections are essential. In a system with shrinking room for manual discretion, accurate records are the only protection against future exclusions.
But it is deeply unsettling to see ordinary people who have paid their taxes, raised families, served their communities and believed in this republic now question their place in it.
The fear is evident: in the trembling of an elderly man holding his form to a mother wondering if her children’s future could be altered by a missing form. No process should make citizens doubt their belonging. Yet, here is a moment where people are afraid in their own homes.
Mohd Talha Masood is a postgraduate student at IIT Kanpur with a background in engineering and interest in policy research.
