Congress ally DMK slams RaGa’s hypocrisy over SIR

In a strongly worded post on X on October 6, DMK spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai questioned Gandhi's stance on the deletions carried out during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process in Tamil Nadu.

 

Annadurai accused the Congress MP of "adopting inconsistent positions" on the electoral roll revision exercise and questioned why developments in Tamil Nadu had not received the same attention as the broader campaign against the Election Commission.


His remarks came after INDIA bloc leaders, including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, marched from Parliament to the Election Commission office in Delhi on Tuesday, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the SIR exercise.


DMK asks why Gandhi has not endorsed Kharge's SIR remark


The DMK has alleged that millions of voters were removed from Tamil Nadu's electoral rolls during the Election Commission's SIR exercise.The DMK spokesperson also sought clarification on why Gandhi had not publicly endorsed a statement attributed to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge.


Kharge had purportedly said that state governments elected after the SIR exercise should be dissolved."Why is he not endorsing Kharge jis statement that all State Governments elected after SIR should be dissolved?" Annadurai asked.He also questioned whether Gandhi had refrained from raising the issue because he was "afraid of @actorvijay" to speak about the matter in the state.

 

Annadurai called Gandhi a "duplicitous man" in his X post, stating, "Once a skunk, always a skunk".The remarks come amid a bitter fallout between the DMK and Congress. After the 2026 Tamil Nadu Assembly polls, the decades-old DMK-Congress alliance collapsed, with the Congress severing ties with its longtime ally and backing actor Vijay's TVK to form the government.


Conducted ahead of the 2026 state polls, the SIR process resulted in the removal of approximately 97.3 lakh names from the draft electoral rolls. The state’s electorate dropped from about 6.41 crore to 5.43 crore. Official data attributed the deletions primarily to 66.4 lakh voters marked as shifted or absent, 26.9 lakh as deceased, and around 4 lakh as duplicates.


Chennai alone saw over 14 lakh deletions, representing more than 35 percent of its pre-SIR electorate in some assessments. Kolathur was among the highest-deletion constituencies in Chennai. Approximately 1.03 lakh voter names were deleted from Kolathur, the seat of DMK head and former chief minister M.K. Stalin.


The DMK had opposed the SIR from the time of announcement of the exercise, describing the compressed timeline as insufficient and warning of large-scale disenfranchisement of legitimate voters. Stalin had then directed party cadres to verify deletions booth by booth, particularly checking whether DMK supporters were among those removed.


In November last year, the party had also approached the Supreme Court against the SIR. The apex court closed the proceedings on DMK’s plea and 12 other petitions in July.


Stalin has publicly attributed part of his party’s defeat to the deletion of several lakh voters under SIR, claiming the exercise disproportionately affected genuine electors and amounted to a conspiracy that helped rivals, including the TVK.


Congress leaders in Tamil Nadu, including senior figures like P. Chidambaram, also raised concerns about the scale of removals under the shifted or absent category and called for verification.