IndiaPosted at: Oct 14 2026 12:27PM


Kharge, Ramesh turn up heat on Modi Govt over SIR, demand answers on ‘Infiltrators’

New Delhi, Oct 14 (UNI) Congress president and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge and Congress general secretary in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh on Wednesday intensified their attack on the Narendra Modi government over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, accusing the BJP-led Centre of invoking illegal immigration to divert attention from the alleged exclusion of crores of Indians from voter lists and restrictions on the right to protest.
Kharge accused union Home Minister Amit Shah of insulting Indian identity by describing the 13.3 crore people allegedly left out of the SIR process as “infiltrators”. He also condemned the reported restrictions on protests at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, arguing that curbs on demonstrations undermined the constitutional right to dissent. The Congress president demanded accountability over the handling of the electoral revision and accused the government of shielding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
In a post on social media platform X, Kharge described the alleged labelling of Indians excluded during SIR as infiltrators as an affront to their Indianness. Invoking a Supreme Court ruling, he also criticised the reported move to withdraw Jantar Mantar’s status as a designated protest site.
“First vote theft, then theft of the right to protest,” Kharge said, accusing the BJP of pursuing an authoritarian agenda. He alleged that people questioning the government were being jailed, young protesters were facing baton charges and detention, and women demonstrators were being subjected to police brutality. He also accused the authorities of allowing members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to operate with impunity.
“No one will bow before the repressive policies of Modi and Shah,” Kharge said, asserting that the country would continue to raise its voice and hold the BJP accountable.
Ramesh, meanwhile, directly challenged Shah to provide figures to substantiate the government’s claims about illegal immigrants. He asked the Home Minister how many alleged infiltrators had been identified, how many had been removed from electoral rolls and how many had actually been deported from India.
In two posts on X, Ramesh said the government owed the public clear answers after nearly 100 crore Indians had been subjected to the SIR exercise. He argued that citizens had a right to know how many suspected illegal immigrants had been detected and what action had been taken against them.
“The fact is that the infiltrator argument is given repeatedly by the architect of the Shah Instigated Removal (SIR) to divert attention from the reality of nearly 14 crore Indians being stripped of their constitutional right to vote,” Ramesh alleged, using the acronym to sharpen the Congress’s political attack on the revision exercise.
He also questioned whether Shah was suggesting that the nearly 14 crore people cited by the Congress as having lost their voting rights were themselves infiltrators. Ramesh further asked whether the Home Minister’s argument implied that the number of illegal immigrants had risen substantially during his tenure.
The latest salvo comes amid the Congress’s sustained campaign against SIR, which the party has portrayed as a threat to universal adult suffrage and the constitutional right to vote. The opposition has alleged that large-scale deletions and stringent scrutiny of voter eligibility risk disenfranchising genuine Indian citizens. The BJP and the Election Commission, however, have defended the revision as necessary to maintain accurate electoral rolls and identify ineligible entries.
The central issue in the latest confrontation is the distinction between correcting electoral rolls and identifying and deporting foreign nationals residing illegally in India. By demanding separate figures for detection, deletion and deportation, Ramesh sought to compel the government to support its claims about infiltrators with verifiable data.
The Congress has also widened its challenge to encompass the functioning of the Election Commission and the government’s response to protests against the revision. Party leaders have accused the authorities of failing to adequately address concerns over voter deletions while using illegal immigration as a political counterargument.
Kharge’s remarks on Jantar Mantar added another dimension to the confrontation, with the Congress contending that restrictions on demonstrations could further limit the ability of citizens and political parties to challenge decisions affecting electoral rights. His demand that the government stop protecting Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar reflects the party’s broader effort to hold the poll panel accountable for the conduct of SIR.
The Congress has insisted that the scale of the revision and the number of voters it says have been affected warrant transparent explanations from both the government and the Election Commission. It has argued that allegations of illegal immigration cannot be used to conflate the status of foreign nationals with that of Indian citizens whose names may have been excluded from electoral rolls.
Kharge and Ramesh’s latest statements thus placed the Modi government under pressure on two fronts: the alleged disenfranchisement of millions of Indians through SIR and what the opposition describes as growing restrictions on peaceful protest. The Congress demanded specific figures on alleged infiltrators, a transparent account of the electoral revision and assurances that neither the right to vote nor the right to dissent would be curtailed.
UNI SKA ARN
Tags: #Kharge# Ramesh turn up heat on Modi Govt over SIR# demand answers on ‘Infiltrators’
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