Alarm bells for BJP as UP voter roll purge triggers damage control push

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh has gone into damage-control mode after the Election Commission’s draft electoral rolls revealed a massive 2.89 crore deletions — nearly 18.7% of the state’s electorate — triggering concern within the ruling party ahead of the Assembly elections next year.

Hours after the draft rolls were published, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and BJP’s Uttar Pradesh president Pankaj Chaudhary convened a virtual meeting of the party’s top leadership, flagging alarm over the scale of exclusions and setting an ambitious target: ensure the addition of at least 200 voters at every polling booth before the rolls are finalized.

According to the Election Commission, 12.55 crore voters currently feature in Uttar Pradesh’s draft roll, even as the state accounts for the highest number of deletions in the country. The exclusions, the EC said, were largely due to voters being marked as deceased, shifted, absent, or enrolled at multiple locations.

With 1.77 lakh polling booths after a recent rationalization exercise, a senior BJP leader was quoted as saying that the party has been tasked with enrolling more than 3.5 crore “genuine voters” across the state. “These include new young voters, names dropped due to documentation gaps or clerical errors, and electors who were untraceable or unmapped during verification,” the leader said.

The target, the leader added, is based on the party’s assessment that Uttar Pradesh currently has around 15.5 crore eligible voters.

The Election Commission has opened the window for claims and objections from January 6 to February 6, with the final electoral roll scheduled for publication on March 6 — a timeline that has sharpened the BJP’s urgency.

Sources said the post-roll meeting involved all state ministers, MPs, MLAs, MLCs, party office-bearers and district presidents, with both Adityanath and Chaudhary underscoring the political risks posed by large-scale deletions.

As part of the strategy, the BJP plans to reach out to Uttar Pradesh natives working in other states who have enrolled at their place of employment. “We will ask them to re-enrol in UP. For instance, a voter from UP currently registered in Delhi will be encouraged to shift back, especially since Delhi has no Assembly elections in the next five years,” a senior leader said.

The party has also asked its cadre to reconnect with voters whose names were registered in two Assembly constituencies — typically an urban workplace address and a rural home constituency. According to another BJP leader, many such voters opted to retain their rural registration due to apprehensions over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), but may not travel long distances on polling day. “We have been asked to persuade them to stay enrolled where they can conveniently vote — both for Assembly and Lok Sabha elections,” the leader said.

The leadership meeting also discussed outreach around the Viksit Bharat–G RAM G Act, with party workers instructed to raise awareness about the benefits of the revised rural employment guarantee framework alongside the voter enrolment drive.