New Delhi: Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday, November 1, launched a sharp attack on Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath over the state's electoral rolls, saying the Chief Minister had himself acknowledged that 1.27 crore votes had decreased following the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list. Yadav made the remarks to reporters before joining the INDIA bloc's 'Chalo Dilli' rally at Ramlila Maidan, news agency ANI reported.
Source: ANI via APNA MA TV
"The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh himself has admitted that 1.27 crore votes have decreased. And when did he remember this? When they lost the MLC election," Yadav said, according to ANI. Mocking the BJP's 'double engine' slogan, he added: "Those who used to boast about a 'double engine' ended up scoring a 'double zero' right there... they couldn't even accept defeat the first time. They colluded with the Election Commission and got a recount done. So think about it: double engine, double zero, and a double defeat in the very same election." The recount and collusion claims are Yadav's allegations; the reports carried no Election Commission response to them.
In a separate post on X the same day, Yadav broke the figure down by constituency: 1.27 crore names divided across Uttar Pradesh's 403 assembly seats works out to roughly 31,514 votes per seat, NationPress reported. He argued the number had been reverse-engineered from the BJP's falling vote share in the recent Legislative Council elections and amounted to a pre-emptive alibi for a future defeat rather than a data finding. That characterisation is Yadav's claim, not an established fact.
Source: NationPress
Yadav also turned a second figure attributed to the Chief Minister against the government. Citing the reported claim that lakhs of government scheme beneficiaries are missing from the voter list — put at 55 lakh in his X post, as reported by NationPress — he asked who had been receiving welfare payments in those names if the beneficiaries were not on the rolls, calling it a potential scandal worth billions. The allegation has not been independently verified.
The row follows the just-concluded biennial elections to 11 Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council seats, in which the BJP won six seats and the Samajwadi Party five — a result this site reported when the counting finished. During polling last month, the SP had separately complained to the Election Commission alleging voter-name deletions, missing indelible ink and intimidation at specific booths; those polling-day allegations also remain unverified, and the Commission had not publicly responded to them at the time of that reporting.
For its part, the Chief Minister's original assertion has been reported in differing forms: ANI's account of Yadav's remarks describes an acknowledgement that 1.27 crore votes had decreased after the SIR, while NationPress reported the Chief Minister's assertion as a claim that 1.27 crore Hindus had been struck off the rolls. Yadav questioned the basis of any community-wise break-up, asking, as ANI quoted him: "Where did they learn this from? Who provided this data? This isn't data you randomly find lying on the street." Neither side's figures have been independently confirmed against Election Commission data in the reports reviewed.
Source: ANI via APNA MA TV
The exchange sharpens the voter-roll fight into a central battleground ahead of the 2027 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, with the opposition carrying the issue to its Delhi rally on Sunday, where other INDIA bloc leaders also raised the SIR and the Election Commission's role, TezzBuzz reported. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if the BJP, the state government or the Election Commission responds with data on the revision.
Source: TezzBuzz