An estimated 13.37 crore names have been deleted across the country from draft electoral rolls prepared during the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) over the past year. One of them is that of the youngest Rajya Sabha MP — Raghav Chadha, who was elected as an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) nominee in 2022 and crossed over to the BJP in April this year.
The deletion has sparked a political faceoff. While Chadha has alleged “political vendetta” by the AAP government in Punjab, a senior Punjab government official and the AAP countered that the SIR is conducted by the EC and the state government has “no role”.
Chadha’s name appears on the list of those deleted in the Punjab draft roll, which was published on August 13, Election Commission records show. This is the ASDD list (list of “absent, shifted, deceased and duplicate”). Against his entry, is the noting: “permanently shifted.”
Chadha was one of the 20.66 lakh or 9.7% of the pre-SIR electorate in Punjab deleted.
Punjab’s final SIR roll is scheduled to be out on October 12. Those deleted in the draft stage have a chance to get back on the rolls by filing a form in the one-month window for claims and objections, from August 13 to September 12.
When asked about his deletion from the Punjab draft roll and what corrective action he had taken, Chadha said: “The AAP government in Punjab has now taken its politics of revenge to the draft electoral rolls. Thankfully, these are only the draft electoral rolls and not the final electoral rolls. They are temporary in nature and subject to the claims and objections process. I am already in the process of availing the remedies provided under the SIR guidelines. I will ensure that this wrongful classification is corrected in the final electoral rolls to be published in October 2026.”
Chadha pointed out that the detailed SIR guidelines issued by the EC in June last year had said that public representatives should be included in the draft rolls.
“All names of members of judiciary, public representatives, holders of declared offices and personalities from fields of arts, culture, journalism, sports, and public services etc. earlier flagged in the electoral database, are to be included in the draft Electoral Rolls, so that necessary documents can also be collected during the period of Claims and Objections,” says Paragraph 4(d) of the detailed guidelines issued on June 24, 2025.
“I am a sitting Member of Parliament from Punjab. If at all my name was flagged, Paragraph 4(d) required my inclusion in the draft electoral rolls. The instruction was not overlooked. It was wilfully violated in my case. AAP may run the Punjab government, but Punjab’s draft electoral rolls are not its private property,” Chadha said.
Saying that he was marked as “shifted” despite being an MP from Punjab, he added: “This does not seem like a mere clerical mistake. This is a clear case of political vendetta,” he said.
Denying Chadha’s allegations, a senior Punjab government official told The Indian Express: “These allegations are completely false. The Punjab government has no role to play in the exercise. The CEO is an official appointed by the Election Commission of India”.
“SIR is conducted by the EC, not the state government, so the Punjab government has no role in deciding whose name is included or deleted from the electoral roll. It is a matter of public record that Raghav Chadha has been living in Delhi, and not in Punjab. If he no longer resides in Punjab, maintaining or shifting his voter registration was his own responsibility. He cannot now blame the AAP or the Punjab government for the deletion of a voter entry,” a spokesperson for AAP said.
According to Section 3 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, to be eligible to be a member of the Rajya Sabha, a candidate must be registered as an elector in any parliamentary constituency in the country.
In his affidavit for the 2022 Rajya Sabha elections, Chadha had declared that he was registered to vote in Booth Number 52 in Rajinder Nagar, Delhi.
However, after he entered Rajya Sabha as an MP from Punjab, Chadha shifted his electoral registration to that state — he voted in a booth in Punjab’s SAS Nagar, or Mohali, in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on June 1, 2024.
A search on the EC’s Voter Services Portal on Wednesday with Voter ID details of Chadha showed “no result found” for both Delhi and Punjab. Delhi’s draft SIR roll was published on August 31 with 33% of the pre-SIR voter names deleted.
Before joining the BJP in April this year, along with six other AAP MPs, Chadha, who was one of former Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s close aides, was at the forefront of AAP’s allegations of voter list manipulation.
On the heels of the Delhi Assembly polls in 2025, Chadha, sitting with then Delhi CM Atishi and Rajya Sabha colleague Sanjay Singh, had raised concern over what AAP had called “an organised and large-scale voter fraud conspiracy” in Kejriwal’s constituency of New Delhi, terming it “a deliberate attempt to manipulate electoral outcomes.”
Calling it “shocking”, Chadha had alleged that over three days in early January 2025, hearings were held at the EC’s office in the New Delhi constituency, where all objectors, totalling 11, were summoned and every one of them “denied submitting any application to delete votes”, and said that their names “were misused.”
Jatin Anand is an Assistant Editor with the national political bureau of The Indian Express. With ov... Read More
Damini Nath is an Assistant Editor with the national bureau of The Indian Express. She covers the ho... Read More
