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.
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