Rapid voter roll revisions, large-scale exclusions and voter dissemination in India are sparking intense debate over electoral integrity and democratic representation in the world’s largest democracy.
By Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty / Global Southasia
New Delhi: As I write this report, there is agitation around India as millions of Indians have found their names removed from the voters’ list after voter roll revisions, conducted via a special intensive revision known as SIR, administered by the Election Commission of India, the constitutional body that holds elections in the country.
According to the latest media reports quoting Commission data, an estimated 13.3 crore (133 million) names have been removed from the electoral rolls after the special intensive revision, perhaps making it one of the biggest stories of rights violations globally.
Though the process picked up controversy due to its exclusionary nature soon after it was announced by the Commission in October, 2025, it received legitimacy from the Supreme Court of India in May, 2026, which removed the last roadblock to its progression.
In the national capital Delhi alone, 1.3 million names were removed from the city’s electoral rolls even in the pre-revision mapping phase carried out in May, 2026. This mass removal of names sparked public outcry, with many voters rushing to fill forms of appeal, to be submitted to the Commission, lest they lose their citizenship.
The draft rolls released in September 2026 by the Election Commission in 17 states and union territories after conducting the revision showed that the voters’ list in India has shrunk by 15.7% since the last parliamentary elections held in 2024. There is no accurate data on population increase in India as the Modi government skipped the decadal collection of data through a census – due in 2020. However, rough estimates suggest that India’s population should be between 1.44 and 1.47 billion. The last population census in 2011 put India’s population at 1.21 billion, making it the world’s most populous country.
An ‘unfair exercise’?
Opposition parties, lawyers and former Commission chiefs are accusing chief election commission Gyanesh Kumar of unleashing an “unfair” exercise at the expense of millions just to ensure that incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party wins elections.
Kumar, who assumed charge in February 2025, announced the country-wide voter revision project a few months later, in October, a disenfranchisement exercise that the Election Commission has continued. The stated aim is to purge the voters’ list of ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ that the Commission claims have entered the Indian voters’ list clandestinely. However, the ECI has provided no evidence to support these claims.
The ECI has since continued the revision process which it justifies with the premise that “illegal immigrants” have, and the list must, therefore, be sanitised to hold free and fair elections. Significantly, two election commissioners who aid the CEC, had objected as many as 14 times, on record, in the last ten months to his actions, as reported by The Indian Express,
Yet, CEC Gyanesh Kumar continued making controversial decisions. The news report, published on 25 September, has since kicked up considerable public outrage in India, catalysing Opposition parties and common citizens from all sections of society, led by youth, to hit the streets across the country, demanding CEC’s resignation.
The opposition’s allegation against the Election Commission is significant given that according to ECI’s own data, the BJP won the 2024 polls by pocketing ‘only’ 36.56% of the popular vote. This indicates that 65% of voters didn’t choose Modi’s party.
Months before the 2024 elections, in August 2023, the Modi government had courted controversy by amending the law that chooses the CEC. The amended law replaced the Chief Justice of India from the selection committee that appoints the CEC with the home minister, who is BJP’s top poll strategist Amit Shah.
Authorities have since subjected millions of people to harassment through this process due to the arbitrary curtailment of names, particularly in poll-bound states, thereby denying voters the right to cast their ballot. For instance, nine million voters were removed from the electoral rolls of poll-bound West Bengal earlier this year.
Since the Supreme Court set up special judicial tribunals in March 2026 to process complaints in that state, more than 3.5 million people have filed appeals against voter exclusion. The tribunals have heard only a fraction of these cases (just 82,782. 2.17%). More than 90% of these were found to be genuine voters and reinstated in the list. By then, the elections were over.
If this is any indication, it suggests that millions of genuine voters might have been barred from casting their ballot in Bengal’s recent elections alone — a significant violation of citizens’ rights in a democracy.
Notably, after ECI’s removal of nine million voters between February and April, 2026, BJP grabbed power in Bengal for the first time. News reports said most left out of voters’ list in Bengal were Muslims, supporters of the opposition All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). Though such biases were flagged by journalists reporting from the ground, barely any remedial action was offered by the Supreme Court monitoring the exercise.
The Constitution of India mandates the Commission to hold a free and fair election. It is beyond the ECI’s remit to deny a citizen the right to vote. How did India, the world’s largest representative democracy, come to a point where the ECI restricts citizens’ voting rights, allegedly to benefit the current government’s electoral goals? One can trace it back to the birth of the two key terms, ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshi,’ used by the constitutional body in Indian electoral and political history.
To do that, we need to train our lens on an Indian state known globally for the heartwarming beverage it produces — Assam tea.
The Assam back-story
Assam, located on India’s north-eastern border, is the largest of eight sister states in terms of population. In 2019, 1.9 million Assam residents were excluded from its National Register of Citizens (NRC) after the state conducted an update process. Those who failed that test were suspected to be ‘illegal immigrants’ or ‘Bangladeshis’.
For the first time, India had witnessed such a large number of people failing the citizenship test in a state at one stroke. That exclusion, though, was the sum of nearly 50 years of a chronology of events in Assam. It included crafting of a narrative by the majority Assamese community by making use of the terms ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ to delegitimise a section of people whom they feared would snatch their political salience in their homeland.
Assam shares borders on its north with Bhutan, and on its south and southwest with Bangladesh. Both international borders have long been unfenced because of various reasons including ethnic affinity of the people on those borders. Since the Partition of India in 1947, Assam’s southern border remained a channel for human movement. During the 1960s when the struggle of East Pakistan to secede from West Pakistan intensified, it led to the birth of Bangladesh in 1971.
In the decade following 1971, suspicions grew among the Assamese towards the undocumented ‘foreigners’ settling in their state. The fear was ignited by the then Chief Election Commissioner S. L. Shakdher claiming that ‘illegal foreigners’ had entered the electoral rolls of north-eastern states in large numbers.
Between 1979 and 1985, a strident ethnic-nationalist agitation hinged on that alarming remark. The agitators demanded that refugees be sent back and ECI revise Assam’s electoral rolls to weed out ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had helped Sheikh Mujibur Rahman to form Bangladesh with Indian military aid, had rejected this demand.
Later, in August 1985, Rajiv Gandhi signed an agreement with the agitators aiming to curtail their fears. The Assam Accord decreed that anyone entering the state after the formation of Bangladesh, 23 March 1971, would not be considered an Indian citizen, and would be deported.
Those who had entered their names in Assam’s electoral rolls before 23 March 1971 would be voters of the state; however their names would be struck off the voters’ list for ten years, from the time Commission revised the voters’ rolls in the state. A special clause (6A) for Assam was inserted into India’s Citizenship Act to reflect the Assam Accord.
That exclusive hyphenated citizenship clause for Assam, however, couldn’t calm the nerves of the local population, primarily because the international border remained unfenced.
By the early 1990s, alongside an armed separatist movement in Assam, many Assamese demanded that New Delhi update the state’s NRC to trace the original residents. The NRC in Assam was an exclusive exercise conducted in 1951 to record the movement of people to and from then East Pakistan through that open border.
Finally, in 2009, an Assamese organisation, the Assam Public Works, filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking a directive to update the NRC under its watch; the court agreed. In 2019, the updated NRC left out 1.9 million residents of Assam.
The BJP shot to power in Assam in 2016 by promising to protect the interests of Assamese voters, including an updated NRC. However, in 2019, it refused to accept the document. Majority of the 1.9 million excluded residents were Bengali Hindus, a critical vote base of the BJP in Assam. The party rejected the document on the plea that ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ — insinuating that Bengali Muslims of Assam — had entered their names in the register by submitting fake documents. Home minister Shah announced that NRC would be readied across India to weed out such elements.
Shaheen Bagh
Since the Modi government had simultaneously moved a bill in Parliament to grant citizenship to non-Muslims from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the move to conduct the NRC in all states kicked up a deep anxiety among Muslims across India about losing their right to vote, thereby their citizenship. This resulted in a three-month-long protest in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh in December 2019, led by Muslim women.
Around this time, terms long used in Assam politics by the majority community to delegitimise a section of voters, ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’, received a national resonance like never before. In the 2024 election campaign, BJP’s political narrative that only Muslims in India could be doubtful citizens by dint of their religion, was amplified.
In 2025, state backing for that narrative led to police in Delhi and neighbouring states picking up Muslim labourers and domestic workers alleging that they were ‘illegal immigrants’ from Bangladesh, rejecting the usual proofs of citizenship like voter identity cards and Aadhar cards. Many, including a pregnant woman, were pushed across the international border with Bangladesh at dead of night.
Significantly, those Muslims termed as ‘Bangladeshis’, were voters in Assam and West Bengal where assembly elections were due in April 2026. All eyes were particularly on Bengal. Winning Bengal, where the incumbent AITC was a strong contender, became the BJP’s biggest challenge. Bihar too was going to polls in 2026 where anti-incumbency against BJP’s coalition government was high.
At the end of 2025, the Election Commission had announced that the country-wide SIR to purge India’s voters’ list of ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ would start from Bihar before the elections were held. Within a few weeks, the exercise was rushed through, resulting in 4.7 million Bihar residents losing their right to vote in that election. Many of those who had been pronounced dead took to social media to say that no booth level officer (BLO) came to check on them. At least 33 BLOs died by suicide claiming work stress, according to media reports.
Though petitions were filed in the Supreme Court to stall the exercise seen as unfair by millions of residents, the court upheld the revision.
Since then, the cascading effect of this exercise has only ensured more misery to citizens across India. Many of those disenfranchised belong to the poorest strata, particularly from the lower Hindu castes and Muslims, as well as those critical of BJP.
Intriguingly, the Election Commission didn’t conduct the revision exercise in Assam where the local demand to remove ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ still festered – and which was also going to the polls.
The BJP-led Assam government didn’t notify the updated NRC for it to be implemented, and instead petitioned the Supreme Court to re-examine the voter list into that document. As a result, the Commission allowed those 1.9 million Assamese residents excluded from the list in 2019 – mostly BJP voters – to cast their ballot in the 2026 elections.
Assam is also the only state after Kashmir where the Commission carried out a delimitation exercise in 2023, to redraw the boundaries of the state’s assembly and parliamentary constituencies. Political scientists and opposition parties have accused the Commission of political gerrymandering as the number of constituencies remained the same after the exercise but the Muslim-dominated constituencies of Assam state have been reduced from 35 to 23.
The BJP has now returned to power in Assam for the third consecutive time, with a higher vote share, 37.91%, compared to its earlier vote share of 33.21% in 2021.
Is it a coincidence that this vote share increased by nearly 5% in the 2026 Assam elections?
In this current pervasive polarised scenario, the answer may well depend on your political views, and whether the information provided changes anything for those on the fence.
Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty is a New Delhi-based independent journalist and author focusing on India’s north-eastern states. She currently serves as the president of the Press Club of India, New Delhi.
This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com.
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