Karnataka minister Satish Jarkiholi, a senior Congress leader, has defended the removal of nearly one crore voters from the state’s voters list under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), insisting the exercise was transparent and carried out strictly according to the rules.

Jarkiholi said only three categories of names were taken off the rolls: people who had died, people who had moved to other areas, and duplicate voters who were registered in two places. He argued that removing those entries was the right decision.

Pressed on the scale of the deletions, he rejected any suggestion of chaos or wrongdoing in the state’s SIR process. He said no eligible voter’s right had been affected, and that the revision helped weed out bogus votes from the rolls.

Congress objections, he says, are about other states

The minister was clear that his party’s opposition to the SIR process is not rooted in Karnataka. According to him, Congress has objections to the way the exercise was implemented in Bihar, West Bengal and Maharashtra.

Karnataka, he argued, was different. Staff were given proper training, and advance information was provided to the public, which he credited for allowing the revision to be completed correctly. The contrast he drew is deliberate. It places his state on the side of procedure and puts the spotlight on how other governments and election machinery handled the same national exercise.

He went further, saying it would have been better if the other states had carried out the process with the same level of transparency. That remark is likely to draw attention, because it places a senior figure from the Congress party in the position of praising an exercise his party has challenged elsewhere.

Cleaning up the voters list is a good policy, but how it is implemented has to be right.

That line sums up the minister’s position. He does not reject the idea of purging the electoral roll. His argument is that the policy is sound and that the execution is what should be judged. For him, the difference between a clean voters list and a disputed one lies entirely in the process.

Why the number is driving the debate

The scale of the figure is what has pushed this story into the spotlight. Nearly one crore names removed from a state’s voters list is a number that goes to the heart of who gets to vote, and who gets left out. Every name removed is a person who, on paper, no longer has a say in the next election.

That is why the minister’s distinction matters. He is essentially saying that the deletions were justified because each category, dead, migrated, or duplicate, is a recognised reason for removal. In his account, none of the names belonged to eligible voters. Whether that holds up will depend on how the removals are scrutinised and documented.

The reporting available does not detail the specific objections raised within Karnataka itself. That leaves the minister’s account as the central account for now. It is a one-sided defence in the sense that it comes from a senior political figure with a stake in how the process is viewed, and it has not been set against counter-claims from the state in the material at hand.

The political stakes are high. A senior leader of the Congress party defending a mass removal of voters, while his party’s objections focus on other states, puts the party’s broader position under the microscope. Critics and supporters alike will read the same statement in very different ways.

For now, the facts on the table are these. Nearly one crore voters were removed in Karnataka during the SIR, the minister says only dead, migrated and duplicate entries were affected, and he insists there was no irregularity. Each of those claims will be tested in the weeks ahead, and the debate over the voters list is unlikely to fade quickly.