Massive voter purge in India destroys democracy

SIR disenfranchises marginalized communities and advances the Hindu nationalist project.

Over the weekend, thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of India's chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, faced mass arrests and a heavy police crackdown in New Delhi. The protests, which have brought together youth activists and opposition parties, are focused on removing more than 130 million names from India's electoral rolls, raising deep questions about the state of India's democracy.

These deletions are the result of the controversial Special Intensive Review (SIR) conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI periodically revises the electoral rolls to add new voters and remove the names of those who have died or moved away permanently. The last compact revision was completed in 2003-2004. What makes the current SIR unprecedented, however, is its scale, the arbitrariness and excesses of its procedures, and the widespread disenfranchisement that followed. The exercise has disproportionately affected Muslims, women, migrants and other marginalized communities, while raising questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) electoral victories in Bihar and West Bengal.

Both the ECI and the ruling party have defended the exercise by using the language of "purification". In a caste society, this rhetoric is deeply disturbing but also revealing. The bureaucratic procedures and technological infrastructure underlying this exercise are hardly intended to create two classes of citizens in India, one with a political voice through the right to vote, and the other reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben called "bare life."

SIR's purpose, procedures, and results reveal a sinister agenda: maximizing voter disenfranchisement rather than increasing voter participation. This undermines the promise of universal adult suffrage, a cornerstone of India's constitutional democracy. The ECI initially removed the government-issued Aadhaar card from the list of documents accepted for voter verification during SIR, allegedly because it was considered "too inclusive". If this did not reveal the exclusive intent of the exercise, the ECI's invention of the category of 'reasonable dispute' during the West Bengal SIR certainly did. This quasi-legal innovation accounts for 2.7 million of the nearly 9 million names removed from electoral rolls in Bengal. The demand for educational certificates, land records, inheritance documents and family trees as evidence also places a heavy burden on poor and marginalized voters, especially in areas still plagued by widespread poverty, landlessness and illiteracy. By shifting the "burden of proof" to ordinary voters, SIR achieves exactly what it wants: mass disenfranchisement and consequent disenfranchisement.

Customized applications and online forms, digital electoral rolls and the requirement to upload scanned documents in prescribed formats are all cited as evidence of the efficiency and objectivity of the SIR. But this approach ignores the digital divide in a deeply unequal society. Technology does not operate outside of power relations. In fact, it often acts as a control mechanism. The 'Logical Discrepancy' category relies on an AI-powered application, ERONET (Electoral Roll Officers Network), which compares voter details with older electoral rolls and reveals differences in names and family relationships. The use of such centralized systems has also raised questions about who controls election data and how these discrepancies are evaluated. Women are especially vulnerable to these methods. Many change their name or address after marriage and may lack the necessary documentation to link to older election records. The extreme exclusion of women shows how seemingly neutral technological practices can reinforce existing inequalities and undermine people's political voice.

The alleged neutrality of the SIR is contradicted by its effects, which hit the weak and the marginalized the hardest. Among the religious minorities, Muslims across the country bear the brunt of the exclusion. In Bengal, Muslims make up about 65 percent of the 2.7 million people who have been excluded from electoral rolls due to "reasonable differences". With only 19 special tribunals set up to hear more than 3.8 million appeals, the redress process in practice remains inaccessible to many disenfranchised voters. In Hyderabad, 1.94 million names for strict deletion under "Absent, Displaced, Dead and Duplicate" (ASDD) category. About 40.7 percent of these entries appear to belong to Muslim voters, while Muslims account for 30 percent of the city's population. In some constituencies in the old city of Hyderabad, Muslims account for more than 80 percent of names deleted. This pattern is repeated in the National Capital Region, Delhi, where almost a third of the voters included in the draft SIR list were absent. Studies show particularly high rates of deprivation in areas with large minority and immigrant populations and among residents of informal and unauthorized settlements. The disproportionate exclusion of Muslims suggests an ideological alignment between the apparently impersonal bureaucracy of the SIR and the social and political agenda of the Hindu right.

This exercise has proven its double power as a political and ideological tool. It has helped shrink the electoral base of the BJP's main rivals by mass-eliminating voters from targeted social categories, such as Muslims. Elections in Bihar and Bengal post-SIR show a recognizable pattern. In the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led coalition lost to the BJP-led coalition by just 0.03 percent of the votes. In contrast, in the 2025 elections, the BJP alliance took the lead after 6.8 million names were removed from the existing list and 2.1 million new voters were added. It has increased by nearly 9 percent. An analysis of the 2026 Bengal Assembly elections also points to the decisive role of the removal of the SIR in the outcome of the elections. The exercise disproportionately affected Muslim, migrant and poorer voters in areas where the BJP has historically struggled to win support. In many constituencies won by the BJP, the number of excluded or disputed voters exceeded the party's margin of victory.

Moreover, the bureaucratic exercise reinforces the larger ideological project of a "pure Hindu" nation. It has also legitimized calls to deport "Rohingyas", "infiltrators" and "Bangladeshis", terms used as dog whistles for Muslims, helping to polarize elections along communal lines. Although Bengali Hindus and others also removed their names from the electoral rolls, the political messages surrounding the SIR in an election campaign with mass accusations portrayed Muslims as a suspect community and threatened their civil and social rights. Predictably, the newly elected BJP governments in Bihar and Bengal moved to deny the benefits of the public distribution system to those who removed their names from the electoral rolls.

The SIR is therefore fed by the imaginary specter of an evil and illegal intruder who must be evicted to maintain the existing order. It follows the Supreme Court-supervised National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, which left the state's 1.9 million residents, who are mostly Bengali-speaking, essentially stateless. It is also similar to the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Law, which introduced different religious access to citizenship, which is an insult to the secular structure of the republic. The recently established High Level Committee on Demographic Changes, tasked with assessing the demographic changes occurring across India due to "illegal infiltration" and "abnormal" population changes among "religious and social communities", is cut from the same cloth. Finally, the SIR is one of many tools at play to criminalize, disenfranchise and de-nationalize social groups and communities that oppose the Hindutva vision of an ethnic state.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.