On 15 October, 400 academics from 27 countries signed a joint declaration titled "Spare India From Anarchy," warning that the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which purports to update the voter list, has sparked claims of the deletion of 13 crore voters and escalated street unrest. The declaration, distributed through the universities of MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, LSE, NUS, Toronto and others, argues that protest rhetoric of "the street over Parliament" threatens constitutional institutions and that violent methods of revolution undermine democracy. One signatory, Dr. Priya Sharma of MIT, said the protests threaten the academic community’s safety and question the rule of law.
The statement follows a march by the INDIA bloc on 6 October that attempted to move from Parliament to the Election Commission’s headquarters but was blocked by barricades. Rahul Gandhi announced that 300 opposition MPs sought to meet Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a request denied by the poll body. On 12 October, the bloc filed a petition in the Supreme Court alleging irregularities in the SIR and demanding a halt pending an independent audit led by a retired Supreme Court judge.
A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued a notice to the Election Commission on 15 October, asking it to address the concerns raised by the petition. The signatories urge all social and political groups to raise their grievances through debate, discussion and democratic protest rather than street mobilization. They invoke Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s warning that "the grammar of anarchy" must be abandoned in favor of constitutional methods.
The next major development will be a Supreme Court hearing scheduled for 30 October, where the petition challenging the SIR will be examined. Meanwhile, political parties are expected to convene within Parliament to discuss the contentious revisions, and the Election Commission has reiterated that the SIR is a routine update of the rolls.