Nadda defends SIR, asks Congress to look into ‘actual reason’ for its electoral debacles

The Rajya Sabha concluded the discussion on electoral reforms on Tuesday (December 16, 2025), with the Leader of the House and Union Minister J.P. Nadda defending the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and urging the Opposition to cooperate with electoral reforms as they are essential for democracy. The Opposition’s response was spearheaded by All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Derek O’Brien, who said the SIR seeks to “divide, distract and deflect”.

The Opposition Congress had misled the people of the country by creating a “false narrative” on the SIR, Mr. Nadda said in his concluding remarks. The Congress had hurt national sentiments by questioning the Election Commission of India (ECI) in order to hide its (the Congress’s) electoral failures, he alleged. “Instead of blaming the Election Commission and electoral process, the Congress should find the actual reason for its successive defeats in elections,” Mr. Nadda said.

No infiltrators would be included in the voter lists, or vote in elections, the Minister said. “The SIR falls within the Constitutional powers of the EC and it is the Commission’s duty to periodically purify and rectify the electoral rolls to ensure no eligible voter is excluded from the list, and no ineligible voter is included. In the past four months, an attempt has been made to create an atmosphere in the country regarding the SIR... as if some rigging is taking place...The [Bihar] election results that have come in must surely trouble you (the Congress). You are applying the medicine somewhere, but the disease is somewhere else. You will have to find your own disease,” Mr. Nadda said.

The SIR was conducted in 1952, 1957, and 1961 when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister; in 1965, when Lal Bahadur Shastri was PM; in 1983, when Indira Gandhi was PM; in 1987 and 1989, when Rajiv Gandhi was PM; in 1992, when P.V. Narasimha Rao was PM; in 2002, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was PM; and in 2004, when Manmohan Singh was the PM. “Except for Atal-ji, every time the SIR was carried out, the PM was from the Congress,” Mr. Nadda said.

Opposition’s attack

Countering Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s statement in the Lok Sabha that the SIR is meant to “detect, delete, deport,” Mr. O’ Brien said the ‘Ds’ actually stood for “divide, distract and deflect”. The Centre was using the SIR to divide people and “polarise the electorate on the basis of religion and language”. “You speak Bengali in some other States and you are targeted as being Bangladeshis — that’s divide,” Mr. O’ Brien said.

“To distract from your own failures, you come up with a whole lot of other distractions... and deflect,” he said, adding that the blame for infiltration must be with the Union Home Ministry. “The big thing is infiltrators... who is in-charge of the borders? Which Chief Ministers? No. It is the Home Minister of this country,” he said.

Mr. O’Brien also accused the Centre of flouting the model code of conduct. “One campaign is on TV, say, the Prime Minister of India is campaigning, the neighbouring campaign is showing the byte [that] that’s where the voting is going on. Let us play by the rules...rules are there, but are we following the rules? When one Election Commissioner objected, he was asked to resign,” the TMC leader said.