Alert: 9.1 million voters deleted

Senarul Haque, who retired at age 60 from India's Central Reserve Police Force after 35 years of service, has found his name deleted from the rolls. He is one of "I served the country in some of the most difficult areas. Now I am being denied the right to vote, and no one is answerable." His is one of the approximately 3.11 million Muslim names that were deleted.  

The Election Commission of India, acting under a Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government, has removed more than 10% of West Bengal's electorate through a process it calls the Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

On the campaign trail, Prime Minister Modi described the exercise as targeting "illegal Bangladeshi infiltrators," while Home Minister Amit Shah called it essential to prevent the country's democratic system from being "polluted." No evidence of infiltration has been produced.

What has been produced is a legal category the Election Commission invented: "logical discrepancy" — a term, as former Lok Sabha Secretary General P.D.T. Achary has noted in The Hindu, unknown to Indian election law.

In Bihar, where the Election Commission first piloted the revision of the rolls between June and September 2025, more than 6.5 million voters were removed. Fewer than 1% of deletions were attributed to citizenship questions. In the constituency of Dhaka alone, the New Indian Express found officials from Modi's party attempting to strike 80,000 Muslim voters from the register. Weeks after the revision concluded, Modi's coalition won Bihar. West Bengal, on the other hand, has never been won by Modi's party.

The algorithm at the heart of the revision of the rolls flagged parents under 16 and families with more than five siblings as suspicious — both common in older generations. It did not account for the absence of a standard transliteration of Bengali names into English, nor for the natural evolution of surnames across generations.

"If software is being used to delete voters on the basis of these minor discrepancies, then it is a weapon against citizens' rights and not fit for purpose," said SY Quraishi, former Chief Election Commissioner of India. "It took us 30 years to achieve 99% accuracy in the rolls. They expect to exceed this in three months. Why this frantic rush, if the main objective is accuracy?"

The pattern of removal answers that question. In some Muslim-majority constituencies along the Bangladesh border, nearly half of all voters were struck off. In Murshidabad and Malda, constituency-level data suggests 65% of the 2.7 million voters whose cases remain unresolved are Muslim.

What is unfolding in India is the latest iteration of a method being refined and exported across the world: the use of administrative and legal machinery — voter purges, algorithmic manipulation, judicial harassment — to achieve what blunter instruments of repression no longer can. Deletion notices were generated centrally and without explanation, bypassing local electoral officers, and in border districts, verification drives triggered panic, with reports linking the process to a series of suicides.

The revision of the rolls sits alongside a second alarming intervention. A proposed redrawing of parliamentary constituencies based upon a data collection drive spearheaded by the government — a brazen attempt at gerrymandering. Last week, the proposal failed to secure the required parliamentary supermajority — a temporary reprieve, not a defeat.

"After this is completed," said Indian economist Parakala Prabhakar, "it will create two classes of Indians: those who are allowed full participation in political society — and those who are shut out. This is about killing the citizenship of minorities. It is a bloodless political genocide."

India is the world's most populous democracy. If the machinery being tested in Bihar and West Bengal is allowed to consolidate, it will not remain confined to India. From the Observatory, we continue to document these developments and stand in solidarity with every Indian citizen whose name has been erased from the rolls of their own democracy. We call on democratic governments, international institutions, and progressive movements worldwide to reject the use of administrative procedure as a weapon of disenfranchisement — and to stand with the people of India.