The selective solidarity at the heart of India’s voter protests

Across India, opposition parties, students and farmers are protesting against a sweeping revision of electoral rolls that has removed some 130 million names. They are demanding the restoration of the old voter lists and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – as the Election Commission of India (ECI) calls the exercise – requires voters to prove their eligibility, often through old documents.

Six years ago, Muslims took to the streets to warn that making citizenship dependent on such paperwork could leave millions vulnerable to exclusion, particularly Muslims. Their warnings were largely ignored. Now that the threat of exclusion extends beyond Muslims, many who ignored their warnings are taking to the streets themselves.

I am proud to see common people across India taking risks for one another in these protests. But I cannot ignore the hypocrisy in the opposition’s response: while it is right to challenge the SIR, its demands leave untouched the citizenship law against which Muslims protested in 2019 and the suspicion cast on them as “infiltrators”.

Some of those now marching against the revision once opposed the 2019 protests themselves. The question is whether this movement will challenge the discrimination Muslims warned about, or simply demand protection for those now caught in the same machinery.

In December 2019, Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which fast-tracks citizenship for persecuted members of six religious communities from three Muslim-majority neighbours. Islam is the one major faith of the region it leaves out.

The danger lay in what the government planned to pair it with. That April, Amit Shah, now India’s home minister, told reporters in Kolkata, the capital of the eastern state of West Bengal, to “understand the chronology”: the citizenship bill first, a National Register of Citizens (NRC) after it. The NRC would be a nationwide register of Indian citizens, requiring people to prove their citizenship to be included. In November 2019, he told Parliament that the NRC would be carried out across the country.

Muslims understood the sequence at once. Anyone unable to prove their citizenship risked being excluded from the register. How could people who could barely afford shelter or two meals a day be expected to produce old documents they had never been required to keep? The CAA would then offer a way back to everyone it caught, except Muslims.

Muslim women staged a sit-in at Shaheen Bagh in the national capital territory of Delhi that continued through the winter. They were not simply warning about a future NRC, but refusing to accept a citizenship law that discriminated on religious grounds. On December 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi insisted that his government had never discussed a nationwide NRC. Much of the country took him at his word.

Six years later, documents are being demanded anyway by a different office and under a different name. When the ECI ordered the revision in the state of Bihar on June 24, 2025, it listed the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” among its reasons. Its document rules turned on two birth dates, July 1, 1987 and December 2, 2004. The later you were born, the more of your parents’ documents you had to produce. In the Supreme Court, the ECI’s lawyer said the revision verifies citizenship according to the 2003 amendment. This means that a voter list is, in effect, being used as a register of citizens, without the government ever announcing an NRC.

In Parliament last December, Amit Shah said the SIR was meant to “detect, delete and deport infiltrators”. He has separated refugees from infiltrators by motive. In his account, refugees come seeking safety for their religion, while infiltrators cross for economic reasons. That is the distinction the CAA writes into law. In Indian politics, the word ghuspaithiya, which means infiltrator in Hindi, has a well-understood target. In West Bengal, Suvendu Adhikari, the BJP leader who now governs the state, promised that the SIR would “strike out the Bangladeshi Muslims from the electoral rolls”. The ECI has still not revealed how many foreigners it found.

West Bengal is where the revision has run its full course, so it is where we can see what it does. About 9.1 million names, roughly 12 percent of the electorate, were removed before the state voted in April. By one booth-level count, almost two-thirds of those removed were Hindus. Most were dropped at the first stage, where officers mark voters as absent, shifted, dead or duplicated. At that stage, Hindus and Muslims were removed roughly in proportion to their numbers.

The second stage is where the state had to make judgements. About six million voters whose forms showed what the ECI called “logical discrepancies” were sent to judicial officers. A discrepancy could be as small as a parent’s name spelt one way in the 2002 roll and another way now. The judicial officers removed 2.7 million people. Of those removed at this second stage, about 70 percent were identified as Muslim by surname in an analysis of the ECI’s published lists. Muslims make up about a quarter of the state’s electorate. Researchers at the Sabar Institute in Kolkata found that Muslims had, if anything, been more successful at tracing their families to the old rolls and were more likely to have been at home when officers visited. They were removed at the stage where the outcome turned on an official’s discretion.

In October last year, as the revision reached West Bengal, the state BJP planned about 700 camps in border districts to help Hindu refugees apply for citizenship under the CAA. The message was that those who applied would keep their place on the roll. A Hindu refugee family struck off in West Bengal has a statute written for it, but a Muslim family missing the same paper has a tribunal whose backlog could take years to clear.

The exclusions extend beyond West Bengal. In Delhi, the draft roll published on August 31 left out 4.75 million of the city’s 14.5 million voters. Okhla, the Delhi Legislative Assembly constituency that includes Shaheen Bagh and Jamia Nagar, lost 45 percent of its electorate. Patel Nagar, a seat reserved for Dalit candidates, lost 42 percent.

The fact that voters beyond the Muslim community are now struggling to prove they belong on the electoral roll should strengthen the demand for safeguards. But who exactly are those safeguards meant to protect?

The movement’s own words are the best evidence. On September 30, the opposition bloc of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) set out its “non-negotiable” demands. Those were CEC Kumar’s removal, the pre-SIR rolls, paper ballots, an appeals mechanism and “protection for genuine voters from exclusion due to technical/administrative reasons”.

The problem I see with that last phrase is that it protects the genuine voter from a careless official. It has nothing to say about the voter whom the state has decided is not genuine, and in West Bengal that voter was most often Muslim. This month, Shah accused the opposition of planning to register infiltrators as voters. The Congress party replied by asking how many infiltrators the SIR had actually caught, and whether infiltration had grown on his watch. It was meant as a rebuke. It also accepted his premise.

Some of the people now leading these marches held that premise long before the SIR existed. On October 4, cousins Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackeray led protests in Mumbai, the capital of the western state of Maharashtra, demanding that the revision be scrapped. In February 2020, Raj’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena party marched through Mumbai to Azad Maidan. It demanded the eviction of Pakistani and Bangladeshi “infiltrators”, and Raj called it a “befitting reply” to the anti-CAA protests. He told the crowd he did not understand why Muslims were protesting against the CAA and the NRC.

The test of solidarity, then, is whether people will defend the rights of those whose political claims are considered inconvenient, too communal or too risky to repeat in public.

That is also why the question of those imprisoned after the anti-CAA protests cannot be separated from the current mobilisation. Activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam remain in prison in the larger conspiracy case connected to the 2020 Delhi violence. Their cases are not a substitute for the concerns of millions facing electoral-roll exclusions. Their continued imprisonment is another test of whether the present movement is prepared to stand with those who protested against the CAA in 2019.

If this movement wants to show it has learned anything from 2019, it needs to challenge the CAA and demand the release of those still held in the Delhi “larger conspiracy” case. If it stops at the old rolls and paper ballots, it will have defended those threatened by the SIR while leaving the discriminatory citizenship law that Muslims protested against six years ago untouched.

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