By Our Special Correspondent
Karnataka’s Special Intensive Revision has achieved what no mystic, no census, and no previous election commission ever managed. It has made the dead responsible citizens. Thirty-seven voters have filed Form 7 requesting their own removal on the explicit ground that they are dead. Another 334 pairs have refined the procedure still further: each has formally declared the other deceased, both remaining listed at the same polling station. The Hindu’s analysis of Election Commission data recorded the pattern. Officials attributed it to software glitches and enumeration errors. In the Commission’s revised universe, the afterlife now comes with an administrative desk and a working knowledge of Form 7.
The service is remarkably efficient. Living people in Vijayapura learned they had been issued death certificates while they stood outside the Deputy Commissioner’s office to protest the fact. A vegetable vendor discovered a Form 7 carrying his name and a death certificate he had never seen; he and seven companions registered their continued existence with the police, an unnecessary formality the rolls had already declined to recognise. The Commission noted that verification would follow and that no name had yet been deleted solely on a Form 7. By then more than a crore names had already left Karnataka’s draft rolls under the Absent-Shifted-Dead-Duplicate-Other category. The dead, it turns out, file faster and more accurately than the living.
Other refinements have kept the miracle alive. Electoral Registration Officers in several states discovered Form 7 objections bearing their own digital signatures that they had never signed. The software, officials later explained, had generated the forms automatically when names were dropped for “logical discrepancies.” No written protocol or standard operating procedure had been issued. The discrepancy became logical the moment the form appeared. Single objectors elsewhere filed dozens of Form 7s in a day, many aimed at particular communities. The Commission observed that Booth Level Agents are permitted a daily quota and that hearings would distinguish the genuine from the fabricated. Living voters marked dead have been asked to prove they are still alive. Dead voters, according to the Karnataka forms, have already proved they are not.
The process has developed its own internal etiquette. When two people at the same booth simultaneously declare each other deceased, both applications are recorded and the exercise continues. When a person files to delete himself as dead after the draft roll is published, the name remains long enough for the form to be accepted. When entire families in Bengaluru find themselves erased while still occupying the same houses for decades, the burden of restoration falls on them. When Election Commissioners record repeated written objections to decisions taken without their knowledge—on the SIR process, on changes to Form 6, on the centralisation of the database—the institution replies that differences of opinion are normal and that final outcomes were unanimous. The dead have complied with the process. The living are required to demonstrate they have not yet joined them. The officials who designed the exercise remain satisfied that the machinery is functioning as intended.
What the exercise reveals is not a series of isolated errors but a system that has made the electoral roll a malleable administrative product. The dead request their own erasure and the request is logged. The living discover they have been declared deceased and must produce evidence of their continued existence. Bulk Form 7 applications targeting specific groups are noted as within permissible limits pending hearings that may or may not reverse the deletion. Auto-generated forms carrying officers’ digital signatures appear without prior written authority, and the absence of an operating procedure is treated as a minor procedural detail rather than a reason to pause. Each step is explained after the fact as a technical or administrative necessity. None of the explanations requires the Commission to stop, reverse course, or acknowledge that the scale of the anomalies has exceeded ordinary error.
In any ordinary office, a form in which a living person declares himself dead would halt the system and trigger an inquiry into forgery or catastrophic failure. In the Special Intensive Revision, it becomes another entry to be reconciled later. The 37 self-deletions and 334 mutual death declarations are not anomalies that expose the exercise. They are the exercise speaking in the only language it has left. The dead have submitted their paperwork. The Commission has accepted it. Everyone else is free to argue with the record.
