Economist Parakala Prabhakar, a vocal critic of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), will join Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke and actor Prakash Raj at an anti-SIR protest in Delhi on October 23. He has called the exercise a deeper project to reshape India’s political society and urged the poll body’s disbandment.
Economist Parakala Prabhakar is all set to share the stage with Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke and actor Prakash Raj on October 23 at an anti-Special Intensive Revision (SIR) protest in Delhi, barely weeks after joining the two at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park.
A look at Prabhakar’s timeline on X reveals that he has been an outright critic of the SIR, going so far as to call for the exercise to be scrapped in its entirety.
This was even before The Indian Express published its investigative report on September 23, which raised questions about whether Election Commissioners were aware of several critical decisions taken during the rollout of the SIR.
Three weeks before the report came out, Prabhakar shared an interaction with an online publication, arguing that the implications of the SIR were grave and went beyond merely cleaning up electoral rolls.
Calling the SIR a much “deeper project”, he wrote on September 2: “The exercise, with arbitrary and targeted deletions, transforms the nature of our political society. It customises the electorate to suit the majoritarian agenda.”
On August 31, weeks after the draft rolls for Telangana were published, Prabhakar pointed to deletions in Hyderabad and tweeted: “ECI ups its game in Hyderabad city and Telangana! They tested the waters in Bihar and found no resistance. Then Bengal happened. A bit of resistance, but they overcame it. So, now it’s no holds barred!”
However, after the investigative report on the poll body created ripples across the country, Prabhakar upped the ante, writing more frequently about the SIR and the ECI’s functioning, while calling for the electoral body to be disbanded.
In several of his posts and media interactions, he went on to describe the SIR as “a much deeper project intended to customise India’s political society to turn it into a Hindu Rashtra than to merely benefit a political party.”
