Maharashtra’s voter list has shrunk by a staggering margin under the Special Intensive Revision, and what started as a numbers story has now folded into something much bigger politically as the Thackeray brothers demand a rollback.
Figures from the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer show the state’s draft roll dropping from 9,78,54,049 voters before the exercise to 7,71,65,562 after it, a gap of 2,06,88,487 names.
Mumbai alone saw its voter count fall from 1.45 crore to just 97.53 lakh but the Election Commission of India (ECI) isn’t treating this as a cause for alarm.
According to reports, the Commission said voters who left off the draft “need not panic,” pointing to the claims and objections window built precisely to catch names like these before the roll becomes final.
That window was supposed to shut on September 30, but the Commission extended it until October 12, giving Maharashtra voters time to file their claims.
The deadline for roughly 1.22 crore flagged entries moved to November 10, while the final roll stays on track for November 4.
Just two days after the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) Jail Bharo Andolan at Shivaji Park on October 2, where the party demanded CEC Gyanesh Kumar step down.
Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray and MNS leader Raj Thackeray led a joint “Virat Garjana Morcha” across Mumbai on October 4, marching from Metro Cinema to the BMC headquarters with Congress and NCP (Sharad Pawar faction) leaders in tow.
Before the march happened, the Thackeray cousins had already thrown their weight behind CJP’s protest at a joint press conference.
CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke didn’t hide his gratitude, telling reporters, “I sincerely thank Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray for extending their support to the CJP’s protest in Mumbai on October 2.”
By the time Sunday’s march rolled around, Uddhav wasn’t just showing up in solidarity; he went on the offensive against the CEC directly.
UBT chief accused Gyanesh Kumar of acting as the BJP’s “weapon,” and threw out a pointed question that “If the SIR was conducted to weed out Bangladeshis from the voters’ list, then how many Dhaka residents residing illegally in the country did the government find?”
Raj Thackeray, standing right next to him, went even further, calling for the entire Maharashtra SIR exercise to be scrapped.
What you’re left with in Maharashtra right now is two fights happening at once, tangled with each other.
One is procedural: whether the process can actually pull back the nearly two crore missing names before the November 4 cutoff.
Two is political: whether the SIR exercise, and the man running it, can survive a protest wave that now includes CJP’s street mobilisation plus a joint front between two cousins who rarely agree on anything.
Claims stay open until October 12 as the final roll lands a month later, but neither question looks close to settled.
