Mumbai: Ahead of the Election Commission’s anticipated Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Maharashtra, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is conducting its own SIR simulation across the state.
The party had formed a committee under the leadership of former MP Kirit Somaiya to conduct its own SIR-like exercise two months ago.
The committee, after several meetings, site visits and poring over electoral rolls, has drawn up a list of 30 of Maharashtra’s 288 assembly seats, where there has been an “irrational” increase in the number of voters—over 40 percent—between 2009 and 2026. It took 2009 as the base year as that was when the previous delimitation exercise was concluded and constituency boundaries were finalised.
All these 30 constituencies are those that have a dominant Muslim population, Somaiya told ThePrint. Overall, there are 38 assembly constituencies with a Muslim population of more than 20 percent.
“If you look at some of the urban, largely Hindu constituencies, there has hardly been a change in the number of voters, but the number of voters in some of the Muslim dominated constituencies such as Malegaon, Mumbra, Malvani, Mankhurd-Shivajinagar, Sillod, Akola, Amravati has increased beyond 30-40 percent, even close to double in some cases,” Somaiya told ThePrint.
The SIR committee’s duty, he said, is to ensure that all “illegal Bangladeshi voters are deleted from the voter lists.”
“Further, we have to also ensure all new eligible voters are added to the list, and while doing so, the committee has to prepare our battalion of workers to assist in the SIR exercise at the ground level.”
Apart from Somaiya, the Maharashtra BJP’s SIR committee has about 12 members including Rajya Sabha MP Bhagwat Karad, MLAs Randhir Savarkar and Mangesh Chavan, and former MLA Sunil Rane, among others.
In February, the EC had said that the next phase of SIR, which will include Maharashtra, will begin from April.
Also Read: In Fadnavis’s home turf Nagpur, an all-women leadership team will steer the civic body
The BJP’s ‘own SIR’
After the committee was formed on 11 February, Somaiya has made 46 visits to take stock of the voter lists and also hold meetings with district-level BJP workers regarding the SIR committee’s efforts.
The former MP has been putting some of his findings in public domain, sharing them on his social media accounts. On Tuesday, he posted on ‘X’ saying the Chikhali assembly constituency in Buldhana had “fake names of thousands of voters.” It was followed by a list of duplicate Muslim names.
Similarly, on Monday, Somaiya put a post saying, “In the voter lists of Malegaon and Dhule, there are 18,000 voters with similar/identical names.”
#SIR in Maharashtra
18,000 Voters Names Same/Similar in the Voters Lists of Malegaon & Dhule.
They are
NABEEL AHMAD ANSARI
NABEEL AHMAD ANSARI
MOMIN MOHAMMAD
SHABANAM PINAJARI
SHAHRUKH PINJARI
NADIMUDDIN SHAIKH
SHAIKH DANISH
SHAIKH DANISH
SHAHID SHEKH
SHAIKH DANISH
SHAIKH… pic.twitter.com/Vrf90RCT7B
— Kirit Somaiya (@KiritSomaiya) April 13, 2026
He goes on to cite examples of several Muslim names. Along with the post, he also put up a 2024 letter of the BJP’s Dhule assembly segment head, Anil Agrawal, addressed to the district collector, highlighting duplicate names in the voter lists of assembly constituencies of Malegaon Central and Dhule City.
“In some cases, one photo is of a younger age, and another more recent. Some cases have one photo with different clothes and another with different, or there are photos with a slight change like a beard, or glasses, or a cap,” the BJP functionary said in the letter.
Maharashtra, which has among the lowest fertility rates between 1.4 and 1.6, should not have a dramatic addition to the voter rolls between 2009 and 2026, but some constituencies are seeing an unnatural addition, Somaiya asserted.
One reason, he said, could be migration and the other, because of fraudulent addition.
“In rural areas, there’s not much migration. In Mumbai, there’s almost a status quo when it comes to migration, we have observed. Take four Hindu constituencies of Mumbai—Mulund, Dahisar, Chembur, Vile Parle—the number of voters in 2009 and 2024 is almost similar.”
“But, in Mumbra Kalwa constituency (with a significant Muslim population), from 2.79 lakh in 2009, the total number of voters has grown to 4.89 lakh. In Mankhurd, Chandivali, Kurla, Malvani, the growth is dense in Muslim localities. It is the duty of the BJP SIR committee to study this, identify unnatural, unreasonable, abnormal growth and find out where the voters have come from,” Somaiya said.
All committee members have been given different sets of constituencies to scrutinise voter lists and build teams under them. They were asked to form district-level SIR committees, and organise workshops at every assembly level.
Further, at the level of every booth, the BJP’s committee is in the process of appointing a booth-level functionary to coordinate with the Block Level Officers of the Election Commission once the SIR begins.
“We have completed 80 percent of the appointments. We hope to have all our infrastructure in place before the EC announces the beginning of the SIR exercise. Once all booth-level persons are in place we will also begin door-to-door surveys,” Somaiya said.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
Also Read: Three-term Ghatkopar corporator, ‘Marathi Hindu’ Ritu Tawde is BJP’s Mumbai mayor pick