Hyderabad: Charminar – the constituency that takes its name from the monument at the heart of it where lanes run narrow and deep through Laad Bazaar, Pathergatti and Ghansi Bazaar – lost the fewest names in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in all of Hyderabad’s 15 Assembly seats. As many as 94,174 electors were left off its draft roll, against 1.79 lakh in Jubilee Hills and 1.55 lakh in neighbouring Yakutpura. Look at why the names were deleted from the draft list and Charminar starts looking an outlier.
Across Hyderabad, the reason recorded against seven of every 10 exclusions was “shifted,” which means a voter has moved away from the registered address permanently. In Charminar, it accounts for fewer than half.
What fills the gap, though, is “absent,” where a Booth Level Officer (BLO) did not find a voter at the registered address. Charminar has 36,086 such entries, which translates to 38 in every 100 of its likely deletions from the draft SIR roll. In the other constituency of Malakpet, which is located close to Charminar, the number drops down to around six out of every 100.
Of those absent, an estimated 23,000, or 65 in every 100, entries carry Muslim names, according to an analysis of the Election Commission’s Hyderabad SIR list by Siasat.com.
63 in 100 of flagged list in Charminar have Muslim names
Overall, an estimated 59,000 of Charminar’s excluded electors carry Muslim names, about 63 in every 100. Only Bahadurpura, at 86, and Chandrayangutta, at 72, are higher.
The shifted category covers 42,238 names, of whom an estimated 24,000, or 58 in every 100, have Muslim names. Among 10,231 recorded as dead, the Muslim-name estimate is 7,000, or 67 in every 100. Among 5,619 marked as duplicate, which is the smallest category, it climbs to 75 out of every 100 voters flagged for deletion under the Absent, Shifted, Dead and Duplicate (ASDD) categories.
Deletions nearly equal to votes cast in 2023
Charminar went into the SIR exercise with 2,37,483 electors. At the end of it, it retained 1,43,309 on the draft roll, a reduction of around 94,000 – about 40 in every 100 came off, nearly as much as the overall Hyderabad figure of 41.
Mir Zulfeqar Ali, a former mayor of the city, held the seat for the Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) in 2023 with 49,103 votes and just over half the total votes polled. Megha Rani Agarwal of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) polled 26,250 votes, with the margin between the two candidates being 22,853.
The number of names now deleted from the draft roll is more than four times that margin and nearly double the votes Zulfeqar Ali polled to win the constituency. It is also 96 per cent of every vote cast in the Charminar Assembly constituency in 2023.
Who is on the ASDD list?
According to Siasat.com’s analysis, most of those left off Charminar’s roll are of working age. The largest group is people aged 35 to 44 with 29,139 entries. Next come those aged 45 to 59 constituting 23,901, and then people aged 25 to 34, at 18,532. People above 60 make up 19,177 of the number and those aged 18 to 24 constitute 3,425 of electors likely to be deleted in the draft roll.
Together, over 47,000 people on the list are between 25 and 44.
In each of those age groups, large numbers were marked absent rather than shifted. Among those aged 25 to 34, as many as 9,698 were recorded as shifted and 7,532 as absent. Among those aged 35 to 44, it was 14,660 and 11,866, respectively. Among those aged 45 to 59, as many as 10,267 were marked as shifted and 9,335 were marked as absent.
Among the youngest voters (18 to 24 year olds), more have been marked as absent than shifted – 1,541 absent versus 1,465 shifted.
Only above 60 does death constitute the highest number. In Charminar, 6,486 of the 19,177 are recorded as deceased, 63 per cent of every death entry in the seat.
Disclaimer
Charminar is an Old City seat with a large Muslim electorate, and a list drawn from it would read this way.
None of this is a deletion yet. Those who are on the ASDD list will not receive notices, unlike unmapped electors or those flagged for anomalies. However, electors left off the draft roll can file a claim until September 16. Hearings run to October 15, which means that they have an opportunity to get enrolled in the final list that is due on October 19.
Estimates in this report come from a name-based model applied to the Election Commission’s published lists. Indian electoral rolls carry no religion column as the law forbids one. The model returns a probability for each name and only group totals are published.
Charminar’s 63 per cent sits within a range of roughly 56 to 70, as Siasat.com’s analysis carries a margin of error.
(This is Part 6 of a multi-part series on the analysis of the Telangana and Hyderabad SIR. Click to read Part 4 and Part 5. Stay tuned as we publish more)
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