The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission was a bloodless political genocide of citizenship, author and economist Parakala Prabhakar said here on Thursday.

While in the past, in European countries like Germany and African countries like Rwanda, people were either pushed out or killed on the basis of ethnicity, religion, language, or colour, what was happening in India was a targeted deletion of identified people from the electorate to disenfranchise them, Dr. Prabhakar said, addressing a South India conclave on Democracy, SIR, Federalism, Census, and Delimitation.

“In 2026, in India, you can neither push these people out nor kill. What can you do? If you can’t kill a citizen, you kill the citizenship. SIR is nothing but the killing of citizenship by making you disenfranchised, by making you lose your vote,” Dr. Prabhakar said.

Giving the example of Bihar, where the Muslim population was 17%, he said that 33% of the deleted names were Muslims. “So, there is a disproportionate deletion of identified, targeted people,” he said, adding that if the SIR were conducted in all States, 16.5 crore people in the country would have been disenfranchised. Losing a vote would push these people to the margins and make them invisible to even the vote-seeking politician, he said.

Noting that the EC, which oversees all parliamentary and legislative assembly elections in India, was a typical example of single point of failure, Ashok Vardhan Shetty, former IAS officer and member of the high-level committee on Union-State relations, said a centralised system was a fertile ground for concentration of rent-seekers.

Mr. Shetty said that in its recently submitted report, the Committee had made a case for a freeze on delimitation to be extended for the next hundred years or till the Total Fertility Rate of all States converges to a narrow band. The other option would be to follow degressive proportionality as done in the European Union, with a cap on larger States such as Uttar Pradesh and an increase for the north-eastern States.

Calling for a thorough restructuring of the fiscal system, which made States increasingly dependent on the Centre, R. Ramakumar, member of the Kerala State Planning Board, said that reform measures such as sharing of cess and surcharges with States, reworking the guidelines of Central Sector Schemes, and allocating 50% of the divisible pool to States could help re-establish fiscal federalism in India.

Retired Judge Hariparanthaman, quoting from a standing committee report, pointed out that the judiciary in India suffered from a diversity deficit, with the representation of SC, ST, OBC, women, and minorities far below desired levels.

Tara Rao of All India People’s Mission said that during elections in Karnataka, civil society representatives worked in at least 76 constituencies for secular forces.

Mano Thangaraj, Tamil Nadu Minister for Milk and Dairy Development, said the need of the hour was an organised civil society movement that brought together independent bodies to face the rising threat of communal politics.

M.G. Devasahayam, former IAS officer, and Thomas Franco, trade unionist, also spoke.