India’s mass voter purge is hollowing out democracy

Over the weekend, thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, faced mass detentions and a heavy police crackdown in New Delhi. The demonstrations, which have brought together youth activists and opposition parties, centre on the removal of more than 130 million names from India’s electoral rolls, raising profound questions about the state of Indian democracy.

The deletions are the result of the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI periodically revises electoral rolls to add new voters and remove the names of those who have died or permanently moved away. The last intensive revision was completed in 2003-2004. What makes the current SIR unprecedented, however, is its scale, the arbitrariness and overreach of its procedures, and the mass disenfranchisement that has followed. The exercise has disproportionately affected Muslims, women, migrants and other marginalised communities while also raising questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) 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, that rhetoric is deeply troubling but also revealing. The bureaucratic procedures and technological infrastructure underpinning the exercise barely mask its intention to create two classes of citizenship in India, one endowed with political voice through the right to vote and the other reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”.

The SIR’s intent, procedures and outcomes reveal a sinister design: to maximise voter exclusions rather than enhance voter participation. This subverts the promise of universal adult suffrage, a cornerstone of India’s constitutional democracy. The ECI initially excluded the government-issued Aadhaar card from the list of documents accepted for voter verification during the SIR, supposedly because it was considered “overinclusive”. If that did not expose the exercise’s exclusionary intent, the ECI’s invention of the category “logical discrepancy” during the West Bengal SIR certainly did. This pseudo-legal innovation accounted for 2.7 million of the nearly 9 million names removed from electoral rolls in Bengal. The demand for educational certificates, land records, legacy documents and family trees as evidence also places a heavy burden on poor and marginalised voters, especially in regions still reeling under mass poverty, landlessness and rampant illiteracy. With the “burden of proof” shifted to ordinary voters, the SIR aims to achieve precisely what it set out to do: mass deletions and consequent disenfranchisement.

Customised apps and online forms, digitised electoral rolls and the requirement to upload scanned documents in prescribed formats are all presented as evidence of the SIR’s efficiency and objectivity. But this approach ignores the digital divide in a deeply unequal society. Technology does not operate outside relations of power. In fact, it often serves as a mechanism of control. The category of “logical discrepancy” relies on an AI-enabled application, ERONET (Electoral Roll Officers’ Network), which compares voters’ details with older electoral rolls and flags discrepancies in names and family relationships. The use of such centralised systems has also raised questions about who controls electoral data and how these discrepancies are assessed. Women are particularly vulnerable to these procedures. Many change their names or addresses after marriage and may lack the documents needed to establish links with older electoral records. The excessive exclusion of women demonstrates how ostensibly neutral technological procedures can reinforce existing inequalities and weaken people’s political voice.

The SIR’s purported neutrality is at odds with its effects, which fall heavily on the weak and the marginalised. Among religious minorities, Muslims across the country bear a particularly heavy burden of deletions. In Bengal, Muslims reportedly accounted for about 65 percent of the 2.7 million people removed from electoral rolls on grounds of “logical discrepancy”. With only 19 specially constituted tribunals to handle more than 3.8 million appeals, the corrective process in effect has remained inaccessible to many excluded voters. In Hyderabad, 1.94 million names were marked for deletion under the “absent, shifted, dead and duplicate” (ASDD) category. An estimated 40.7 percent of those entries appeared to belong to Muslim voters, compared with Muslims’ 30 percent share of the city’s population. In some constituencies in Hyderabad’s Old City, Muslims accounted for as much as 80 percent of the names marked for deletion. The pattern is repeated in the National Capital Region, Delhi, where nearly one-third of the existing electorate was missing from the draft SIR roll. Studies flag especially high rates of exclusion in areas with large minority and migrant populations and among residents of informal and unauthorised settlements. The disproportionate exclusion of Muslims suggests an ideological alignment between the SIR’s ostensibly impersonal bureaucracy and the social and political programme of the Hindu right.

As a political and ideological instrument, the exercise has proved to be doubly potent. Through mass deletion of voters from targeted social categories, such as Muslims, it has contributed to shrinking the electoral base of the BJP’s principal rivals. The elections in Bihar and Bengal after the SIR suggest a discernible pattern. In the 2020 Bihar Assembly elections, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD)-led alliance lost to the BJP-led alliance by just 0.03 percentage points in vote share. In contrast, in the 2025 elections after the removal of 6.8 million names from the existing rolls and the addition of 2.1 million new voters, the BJP alliance’s lead increased to nearly 9 percentage points. Analysis of the 2026 Bengal Assembly elections also points to the decisive role SIR deletions played in the electoral outcome. The exercise disproportionately affected Muslim, migrant and poorer voters in districts where the BJP had historically struggled to gain support. In many constituencies won by the BJP, the number of deleted or disputed voters exceeded the party’s margin of victory.

Furthermore, the bureaucratic exercise reinforces the larger ideological project of a “pure Hindu” nation. It has also legitimised calls for the expulsion of “Rohingyas”, “infiltrators” and “Bangladeshis”, terms used as dog whistles for Muslims, helping to polarise elections along communal lines. Although Bengali Hindus and others also found their names removed from electoral rolls, the political messaging around the SIR in a communally charged election campaign cast Muslims as a suspect community, imperilling their civil and social rights. Predictably, the newly elected BJP governments in Bihar and Bengal moved to deny Public Distribution System benefits to those who found their names expunged from the electoral rolls.

The SIR is thus fuelled by the imagined spectre of a vile and illicit intruder who must be expelled to preserve the existing order. It follows the Supreme Court-supervised National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, which left 1.9 million of the state’s residents, mostly Bengali speakers, essentially stateless. It also resembles the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, which introduced religiously differentiated access to citizenship, an affront to the republic’s secular structure. The recently established High-Level Committee on Demographic Change, mandated to assess demographic changes occurring across India due to “illegal infiltration” and “abnormal” population changes among “religious and social communities”, is cut from the same cloth. Ultimately, the SIR is one of several instruments at play to criminalise, disenfranchise and denationalise social groups and communities considered inimical to the Hindutva vision of an ethnic state.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.