| M |
arxist poet, playwright and political activist Bertolt Brecht had mused long ago: “Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”
This seems to be coming threateningly alive for a range of people in India right. The state of Bihar is the latest example of this. This time the feat to change the people has come in the garb of an innocent-looking revision of electoral rolls.
The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, ordered by the Election Commission of India in Bihar in mid-2025 to cleanse the rolls before the assembly polls seems to have been another project to disenfranchise a large number of voters and threaten their citizenship rights. The issue is not only pertinent in the context of upcoming elections in the state but also has ramifications for the entire country. This is specially so for Muslims across india, particularly Bengali speaking ones who have been ‘outed’ as Bangladeshis and forced to leave their homes. This has happened recently in Delhi and Gurgaon, Gujarat, Assam and some other states ruled by the BJP.
To get back to the issue, the June 24 order kicked off an enumeration phase, publication of draft rolls on August 1 and a claims/ objections window up to September 1. The ECI said the exercise targeted duplicate entries. It said genuine electors could be re-added during the claims/ objections phase. Critically, it disallowed three important documents including aadhar card, voter-id card and ration card as proof of voter eligibility. Not just opposition and civil society, but common people came out in the streets alleging deletion of genuine voters in larger numbers, supplanted apparently by an equally large number of fake voters.
The scale and speed of deletions became an issue especially in constituencies dominated by Dalits, Muslims and the caste groups purportedly opposed to the JD(U)-BJP ruling alliance. Several platforms and parties reported that extremely large numbers appeared to be missing/ excluded in the draft, creating a perception of mass disenfranchisement. Overall, the deletions totalled 6.5 million voters, a huge number by any standard. The ECI and its supporters (read the ruling party), of course, framed the SIR as a necessary clean-up focused on accuracy.
Opposition parties, however, alleged that while millions of objections were filed/ attempted, many were not recognised “in the prescribed format.” The ECI countered that parties had not filed formal objections while citizens were still engaging with the process—illustrating a gap between political claims and procedural compliance. It took legal escalation to bring out some deadline relief. The Supreme Court also ordered that basic documents like aadhar card be entertained as proof of voter identity. Rights groups (e.g. PUCL) documented field-level friction during the enumeration/ claims phase, adding qualitative evidence to the debate over access, awareness and administrative consistency.
Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, ordered by the Election Commission of India in Bihar in mid-2025 to cleanse the rolls before the assembly polls seems to have been another project to disenfranchise a large number of voters and threatening their citizenship status.
Print media reported that unless the EC expanded document eligibility (e.g., including aadhaar), over 20 million voters might be removed. Interestingly, a newspaper also reported that in three Bihar districts with most SIR deletions, more voters had been struck off from the rolls than the winning margin in two thirds of the assembly seats from the last elections. In just three constituencies, nearly a million votes were deleted. Reporter’s Collective, an independent news portal, similarly highlighted 188,000 cases of dubious double votes in 39 constituencies in the state. It also found 80,000 voters registered on fake or wrong addresses across just three constituencies. Another news outlet found a whopping 150,000 voters concentrated around just 1,200-1,300 households, making them very doubtful, to say the least.
These independent reports came on the heels of Rahul Gandhi, the leader of opposition in Lok Sabha, alleging mass scale existence of fake voters in a single constituency in the state of Karnataka. He based his claim on a detailed research undertaken by the research unit of the Congress Party. The allegation was used to fuel previous claims of fraudulent victory by the BJP alliance in Maharashtra. The repercussions, therefore, have become national in scope and not remained limited to a single state. They have also galvanised opposition parties who have finally hit the street.
What are the implications of all this, specially in the context of Bihar? A thorough purge of rolls is legitimate action as India’s rolls do accumulate duplicates/ . ECI’s legal mandate under Article 324 supports such revisions. But doing a state-wide SIR close to polls highlights political opportunism at a time when all the supposedly independent institutions are seen as captured by the ruling party. The SC’s ‘trust issue’ remark (in the process undertaken by ECI at this juncture) underscores that optics matter as much as procedure.
The headline number of “excluded” electors may have blended duplicate pruning with genuine errors—but the public narrative treated it as flat disenfranchisement - for right reasons, too. It was also evident since ECI’s communications stressed duplicates in general terms but did not release granular, booth-level before-after tables early enough to let third parties verify the net effect. In fact, once Congress came out with its own data, they made their website even more difficult to access, read and research. If even a small fraction of deletions are wrongful and not restored, the risk is disproportionate in close contests and for the marginalised, mobile and first-time voters with higher documentation frictions. Conversely, failing to prune duplicates risks fraud and erodes trust. The policy objective has to be high-precision pruning with maximal redress, not speed.
Together, these measures reveal, that not even after SIR but specially after SIR, the electoral rolls exhibit exclusions—from mis-enumeration and data entry errors to possible fraudulent registrations. This not only has implications for the voting rights of millions of people, but also facilitates a backdoor entry for illegal immigrants. We can all go back to reading Brecht.
The author has been in the developmentsector for more than a decade. He currently works with anInternationalnon-governmentalorganisation based in Delhi. He may be reached at:avinashcoldgmail.com