India, Oct. 23 -- The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which started with Bihar last year, follows a two-step process: publication of a draft roll and then a final roll. The former presented an opportunity as well as a threat to people removed or retained from the pre-SIR roll. The opportunity was in making a claim that the deletion on account of ASDD (absent-shifted-dead-duplicated) was incorrect. The threat was either being unmapped with the previous SIR roll or being flagged for a so-called logical discrepancy.

The logical discrepancy criteria did not exist during the Bihar SIR. It first attracted attention when the process was underway in West Bengal. West Bengal is also the only state where electors flagged under...