In India, a shadow of darkness falls over its vibrant elections

After the election commission removed 130 million Indians from the electoral rolls, widespread protests have heightened tensions across India.

On Saturday, New Delhi, the capital of India, was under siege. The Indian government deployed more than 20,000 police and paramilitary personnel, cordoned off the city center and suspended internet access. By evening, more than 7,000 people, including leaders of Indian opposition parties, lawyers and journalists, had been detained by the police. Despite the crackdown, thousands turned out in Delhi on Monday to protest in greater force.

The crackdown was aimed at preventing a planned demonstration at Jantar Mantar, a traditional protest site in New Delhi. The protest focused on two main demands: the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner of India and the withdrawal of the nationwide process known as the Special Intensive Review (SIR).

The Chairman of the Election Commission is the head of the National Election Organization and is appointed by the proposal of a committee headed by the Prime Minister. SIR purportedly sought to clean up and update electoral rolls, but it left 130 million Indians off the rolls — more than half of Americans eligible to vote in the midterm elections.

The problems really started in the summer of 2025. Several Indian states were about to hold elections for their state legislatures. Before that election, the Election Commission announced the review of the elections in these states, citing the need to "cleanse" the electoral rolls. A large number of voters must prove that they are citizens and have the right to be on the list by presenting one or more items.

Civil society groups and political activists immediately challenged the proposed June 2025 election revisions in the Supreme Court of India. They questioned the power of the Election Commission to carry out electoral reviews on such a scale. The Indian Election Act allows the Commission to revise electoral rolls in certain constituencies, provided it records its reasons in writing. The petitioners argued that this does not give the Election Commission sweeping powers to require voters already on the rolls to re-prove their eligibility.

The petitioners also argued that the Election Commission's list of acceptable documents was exceptional and resulted in large-scale disenfranchisement. In India, access to government-issued documents is highly dependent on caste, caste and gender. Many people simply lack the necessary documents or the ability to navigate the bureaucracy to obtain them.

For months, the Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of election reviews on such a large scale, allowing the practice to become a fait accompli. Instead, it became embroiled in protracted court battles with the Election Commission over the documents Indian voters must provide to remain on the electoral rolls. There will be widespread debate over whether Aadhaar, India's national digital identity document, existed.

But even as the legal debate continued, exclusion from electoral rolls increased. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has never won a state election, 9 million people - about 12 percent of the electorate - removed themselves from the rolls.

Faced with these limitations, and still unwilling to rule on the legality of the SIR, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of creating a full administrative apparatus: courts staffed with judicial officers to hear appeals from disenfranchised voters. When petitioners warned that it would take years, if not decades, for these courts to resolve all appeals, the Supreme Court justices effectively said it would be fine for disenfranchised people to write down the vote in future elections when they are eventually reinstated.

West Bengal elections were held using the new electoral rolls and the BJP won. One indication of the SIR's inadequacy was that about 90 percent of the voters in West Bengal, whose appeals were decided, were eventually returned to the rolls. 9 out of ten voters were removed by mistake. However, even with the number of disenfranchisements in each state running into the millions, the Supreme Court noted that the data did not indicate "systemic disenfranchisement."

Ultimately, when the Supreme Court finally handed down its ruling in the summer of 2026, it upheld the entire exercise. It confirmed the extensive powers of the Election Commission to carry out electoral reviews as it sees fit.

A major argument against this practice was that by requiring every elector, including those already on the electoral rolls, to re-prove their eligibility, the EC was treating each person as presumptively ineligible to vote. This was a grossly disproportionate exercise of power, especially since more proportionate methods were available to the Election Commission.

The court also rejected this argument and, I believe, effectively immunized the commission from the requirement to take proportionate action. As legal scholar Vasudev Devadasan noted, the ruling created a "permanent class" of disenfranchised people who simply could not participate in political life.

The consequences soon became apparent: the new BJP government in West Bengal threatened on more than one occasion to cut off welfare benefits for those delisted through the SIR. Although the Supreme Court noted that SIR was not intended to determine citizenship, by the summer of 2026, the distinction became difficult to maintain.

Beyond the threat to people's welfare rights, there are widely reported cases of passport renewals being denied because applicants have been removed from electoral rolls through the SIR.

In 2020, the Indian government's efforts to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) were widely criticized for how it forced every person to prove their citizenship to government officials, leading to widespread exclusion. After massive nationwide protests against it, the NRC was shelved. Now it seems that SIR is a way to introduce NRC through the back door.

As the SIR progressed across several states – with widespread exclusions in each – patterns emerged: disproportionate exclusions among vulnerable and marginalized people and religious minorities, especially Muslims. and using algorithms to exclude even voters who had the required documents, citing "reasonable differences," such an arbitrary age gap between parent and child, judged by arbitrary criteria that vary from state to state.

Other disturbing facts were also revealed. In certain neighborhoods, people had sent pre-filled forms in bulk, seeking to remove Muslims from electoral rolls by questioning their citizenship. The Indian Election Act allows third parties to object to the inclusion of anyone in the electoral rolls.

In Delhi, the removal of some prominent figures from the lists sparked public outrage. The Election Commission then introduced a "VIP Portal" through which their names could be retrieved and created a two-tier system of caste privileges.

Against this backdrop, an investigative report by Indian Express journalist Ritika Chopra in the last week of September landed like a bombshell. His report showed that although the decisions of the Election Commission were supposed to be made by consensus among the three commissioners, the head of the Election Commission made them unilaterally, often over objections and sometimes without the involvement of the other commissioners. (The Election Commission responded by describing the differing "views and observations" as part of "consultation within each body".)

More reports followed, documenting more unilateral decisions, non-transparent algorithms built by private companies, and an increasing concentration of authority in the Election Commission to add or remove voters. This was a clear departure from India's decentralized electoral system, which is designed to protect against ill-intentioned decisions.

These reports crystallized the latent anger, especially against the head of the Election Commission. Under the Indian Elections Act, election commissioners are appointed by a committee in which members of the political executive hold a two-to-one majority. They are actually executive appointments. An attempt by the Supreme Court in 2023 to reform the system was abandoned by subsequent legislation. Then the court challenged this rule on the backer. All this explains why the head of the Election Commission became the main focus of public anger.

The story of SIR is both a narrative of widespread voter disenfranchisement in India and an organizational crisis. Two failures converged: the failure to enshrine the Independent Electoral Commission in law and the constitution, and the non-intervention of the Supreme Court despite the evidence of disenfranchisement presented by it. Together, they culminated in angry popular protests in Delhi and repression by the Indian government.

It's hard to see how this story ends. The right to vote is hard earned and its loss is deeply felt. History shows that once people lose trust in the institutions that are there to protect this right, it is very difficult to restore their trust. A long shadow hangs over electoral integrity in India. Fixing it requires systemic and urgent reforms. Whether these reforms will be implemented is unclear.