India, March 3 -- When the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise last June, conspiracy theorists cried wolf about fears of widespread disenfranchisement. The first data to emerge from the process, Bihar's draft-roll, should have allayed such fears. Deletions were numerically significant but proportionally far from alarming, and they did not seem to correlate with expected political markers, such as Muslim population or closely fought constituencies. The absolute turnout too increased in the 2025 Bihar elections, which should have laid to rest fears about mass disenfranchisement. Eight months later, after the exercise was conducted in nine states (excluding Assam, which had only Special Revision and not SIR), we are wiser about what the exercise entailed as a detailed analysis in Hindustan Times showed. Deletions have been higher in districts that have seen higher migration and also high voter growth in the past two decades. This suggests that India's pre-SIR rolls did have a duplication problem as migrants registered as voters in their new locations without necessarily deregistering from their hometowns (and villages). Perhaps many of them chose to retain the latter when SIR forced them to make a choice. To be sure, it is extremely unlikely that the share of those actually voting in both places is numerically significant. This suggests that SIR might have made India's electoral rolls statistically more robust on an ex-ante than an ex-post basis. While useful on this count, the exercise has not been without its limitations, procedural frictions and political acrimony. Most states struggled to complete the process on time, forcing their already hard-pressed lower bureaucracy to exert extra effort. In extreme cases like West Bengal, a very high number of voters earmarked for further adjudication are now being handled by judicial officers. A lot of these issues have seen the apex court mediate disputes between non-NDA state governments and political parties on one side, and ECI and the Union government on the other. It is this friction that has turned SIR into a political theatre despite the ultimate result not lending itself to conspiracy theories. Is there a larger lesson to be learnt here? Perhaps, yes. State capacity and institutional trust are key in shaping narratives about the state of democracy in India. When they are found lacking, alarmists always sound more credible than they are....