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Published Nov 20, 2025 | 11:14 AM ⚊ Updated Nov 20, 2025 | 11:14 AM
BLO handing over SIR enumeration form to veteran Malayalam actor Madhu.
Kerala has switched to election mode again — the 2025 local body polls are just days away, with voting split between 9 and 11 December. Parties are hustling, candidates are breathless, and everyone is sharpening their talking points before the 13 December verdict.
However, this time, something odd is happening on the ground.
If you thought candidates were busy battling rival fronts, last-minute rebellions, or the occasional viral WhatsApp grenade, think again. Because this year, Kerala’s netas-in-the-making say they’re up against a far more ruthless opponent.
That enemy is three letters long, endlessly confusing, and capable of derailing an entire day’s campaigning: SIR. Not the kind you respectfully salute — the notorious Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters list.
SIR has stormed into Kerala’s campaign trail like a celebrity gate-crasher, sucking up all the attention and leaving candidates looking like backup dancers at their own show.
Door-to-door campaigning has devolved into an unexpected trilogy: Counselling confused voters, filling out forms with the seriousness of a passport officer, and convincing people that their citizenship is not in peril.
Across constituencies, candidates complain that SIR is eating up their campaign hours, derailing their plans, and occasionally their sanity.
If elections are meant to be a colourful celebration, SIR is that uninvited guest who shows up early, talks the loudest, and refuses to leave — even when the host is clearly hinting at the door.
And like every unforgettable relative, SIR has ensured that in 2025, no candidate in Kerala can honestly claim: “I had a smooth campaign.”
In this election season, candidates across Kerala say voters have only one burning question on their minds — and it’s definitely not “What will you do if you get elected?” Instead, they are greeted with panicked, wide-eyed desperation:
“How do we fill SIR? And what if we make a mistake?”
Candidates who step out to ask for votes now find themselves held hostage in living rooms — not by political debates, but by citizens clutching SIR forms like they’re ticking bombs. One candidate confessed she escaped from three houses only by pretending her phone was ringing… even though it wasn’t.
Door-to-door campaigns, they say, have officially mutated into free walk-in SIR help centres.
One candidate reported spending 20 minutes inside a house — not to explain development projects, not to pitch a vision, not even to sip tea — but to clarify the difference between enumeration and elimination.
“At this point, I’m less a candidate and more a part-time BLO,” he grumbled.
The elderly, in particular, view anything resembling paperwork with the same suspicion usually reserved for phishing calls.
Fears range from losing citizenship to their passport being seized.
One senior citizen earnestly asked whether not filling SIR would affect his pension. Another wondered if SIR was linked to the upcoming local body election.
“Honestly, I spend more time explaining SIR than explaining who I am,” sighed a candidate in Thiruvananthapuram.
House visits, once predictable stops for seeking votes, have devolved into impromptu, handwritten, no-appointment service desks. Several candidates admit they are now “strategically retreating”, where the interrogation allegedly resembles the final personality test of the UPSC exam.
And if the door-to-door chaos wasn’t enough, the phones won’t stop buzzing either.
“By the time we convince someone that the WhatsApp forward they read is fake, they forward five more,” lamented another candidate.
In short, SIR confusion has united the electorate in one emotion: pure, unfiltered confusion and doubts. And candidates in another: Pure, silent suffering.
In rural pockets, the democracy machine is running on one thing: Pure, unadulterated jugaad. Overworked Booth Level Officers (BLOs), sprinting through their hours-long voter-enumeration marathons, have quietly invented a new system: the Shop Election Office.
Here’s how it works:
Dump a stack of forms at the nearest local shop. Voters pick one up and fill it whenever the universe inspires them, and drop it back like returning a library book.
“It saves time. And my legs,” puffed a BLO, already speeding off to the next allotted booth.
But the real crisis? The hunt for the 2002 voter list.
Finding your old voter entry is now Kerala’s version of an escape room challenge — except with no clues, no timer, and no guarantee that the prize (your name) even exists.
Some BLOs, desperate and dehydrated, have started delegating the “2002 search operation” to the voters themselves. Tech-savvy folks scroll through ancient PDFs like archaeologists dusting off inscriptions.
However, for many others, it’s torture.
“The anxiety is unimaginable,” sighed a senior citizen voter.
Meanwhile, Kerala Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Ratan U Kelkar cheerfully announced that 99 percent of the forms have been distributed across Kerala.
But then came the twist: 60,344 forms are currently “untraceable.” And that number, officials admit privately, will climb once digitisation catches up — the bureaucratic equivalent of saying, “Brace for impact.”
District Collectors will be touring verification hubs like college students doing last-minute project checking, while BLOs continue running their daily triathlons across villages, hills, and political emotions.
At the same time, the campaign lessons of 2025 for the candidates are:
(Edited by Muhammed Fazil.)
