One Voter Left: How a Delhi Demolition Drive Erased 728 Names from a Single Booth

New Delhi, Sept. 10: Of the 729 voters registered at one polling booth in Delhi's Bela Estate jhuggi cluster, exactly one name appears in the draft electoral roll published last week.
The other 728 — an entire settled community of labourers, vendors and domestic workers — were struck off in one stroke during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
Their only surviving neighbour on the roll is Mahant Kanchan Giri, a man who lives alone and says he has no idea why he alone was spared.
The mass deletion has its roots in a demolition drive carried out here about a year ago, on the directions of courts.
But here is the twist that has stunned election observers: most residents never actually left.
Denied rehabilitation or alternative housing, they rebuilt makeshift shelters on the same spot and continued living — and voting — where they always had.
Kamal Lal, a registered voter of the locality, told reporters that the jhuggi cluster was demolished around a year earlier, yet people stayed because no alternative accommodation was provided.
He said more than 500 residents had submitted their enumeration forms during the SIR exercise.
Despite that, the Absent-Shifted-Dead-Duplicate (ASDD) list for the booth recorded 728 deletions.
Minutes of meetings between the Booth Level Officer and Booth Level Agents, cited by a citizens' collective, put it bluntly: of 729 electors in Part No. 33 before SIR began, only one enumeration form was recorded as collected in house-to-house visits.
Kamal Lal said he approached both the BLO and the Electoral Registration Officer, yet he and his family were still marked "permanently shifted."
Other residents told Newslaundry that no legal notice informed them their voting rights were being taken away.
Kanchan, 27, said her father, mother, brother and sister-in-law were all marked permanently shifted, while she was logged as "absent/untraceable" — though she never moved.
Her father sells kachoris from a bicycle on the highway, within sight of the home he supposedly left.
Sharda Devi, 74, voted in the 2025 Assembly election; she now fears the deletion is a prelude to being "dumped on the road."
Kanya Kumar, 27, insists she filed her enumeration form on time; she and her husband were both removed anyway.
Mohammad Aftab, 36, worries the loss will cascade into passports, jobs and welfare benefits, everywhere a voter ID is demanded.
A polling official, asked about the exclusions, offered a one-word explanation: the settlement was "unauthorised."
That answer sits uneasily with the Election Commission's own rulebook.
The electoral roll manual states that homeless persons and pavement dwellers without documentary proof of residence are eligible for enrolment, provided they ordinarily reside there — "irrespective of the fact whether that is a private property or pavement or an encroachment on government land."
The Bela Estate case is an extreme fragment of a much larger picture in Delhi.
The draft roll published on August 31 dropped around 47.7 lakh names — roughly a third of the capital's 1.45-crore electorate — though deletion is not final.
Affected voters can file claims with Form 6 and the prescribed declaration between August 31 and September 30; hearings run until October 29.
The final electoral roll is scheduled for publication on November 4, 2026.
For Bela Estate's deleted hundreds, that window is their last chance to prove what the rubble around them already shows: they never left.
As one residents' collective put it, people who lost their homes to bulldozers now risk losing their voice at the ballot box too.