How Mass Voter Deletions Is Altering Indian Politics

In the wake of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, India will have two classes of people: one, those with franchise; and the other, those without franchise.

It is estimated that nearly 13 crore names from the existing electoral roll of the country have been deleted by now. By the time the process is concluded, another one crore might join the list of the deleted. Already about 98 per cent of the estimated 15 crore denotified, nomadic, and semi-nomadic tribes (DNTs) do not find their names in our electoral roll. Our political system is unmindful of them. Now, the SIR would add roughly another 14 crore to that excluded population. Surely, of these 14 crore deletions (through SIR), some could indeed be absent, dead, duplicate, or even “others”. Shifted people will not reduce the overall number of voters in the country unless they have relocated to a foreign land. Shifting from one place to another within the country should not reduce the total number of voters of the country.

The implications of this process are grave for our polity. Those without franchise will be out of the country’s political society. They cannot participate in the country’s political process. Their voices will not be—in fact, need not be—heard. Their priorities, aspirations, concerns, and anxieties do not matter. Political parties and individuals who participate in the electoral process do not have to heed them. Their opinions, likes and dislikes, assessments and judgments about the way the country is governed will have no consequences for those occupying the elected positions in our governance and legislative structures.

The Sabar Institute has published explosive revelations: for example, the total number of deletions from the electoral rolls of two Assembly segments of the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency exceeded the total number of votes cast in those constituencies in the 2023 Assembly election. Malakpet Assembly constituency polled 1,32,024 votes in 2023. Now, the SIR process has deleted as many as 1,47,799 from the total number of voters in the constituency’s electoral roll. Yakutpura, another Assembly constituency in the same Lok Sabha constituency, saw a deletion of 1,54,982 voters through the SIR process. The polling in 2023 there was 1,40,434. Another investigation found that in Polling Booth number 33 in Chandni Chowk Assembly Constituency of Delhi 908 votes were deleted out of a total of 909 votes.

Some States have seen a staggering number of deletions: Uttar Pradesh, 2.89 crore; West Bengal, 93 lakh; Tamil Nadu, 97 lakh; Bihar, 65 lakh; Kerala, 24 lakh; Madhya Pradesh, 45 lakh; Rajasthan, 44 lakh; Gujarat, 77 lakh; Karnataka, 1.07 crore; Maharashtra, 2.06 crore; Andhra Pradesh, 44 lakh; and Telangana, 73 lakh. Haryana saw a deletion of nearly 34 lakh, amounting to 16.38 per cent of its present electorate. Jharkhand saw a deletion of nearly 16.5 per cent. Goa, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Puducherry saw deletions of 11.78 per cent, 22.32 per cent, and 11.67 per cent respectively. Arunachal Pradesh saw a deletion of 19 per cent. Delhi’s electoral roll has shrunk by 35.89 per cent, amounting to 47.5 lakh deletions; and Chandigarh’s by 31.84 per cent.

These figures are from only some States. Data from Nagaland and Tripura are awaited. Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh are yet to begin their SIR.

A Booth Level Officer (BLO) verifies voter details during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, at Karad, in Satara district, Maharashtra, on July 15, 2026. | Photo Credit: PTI

However, some media outlets, citing Election Commission of India (ECI) sources, give a different, and misleading, set of numbers. Those numbers are net numbers after adding the newly enrolled voters to the electoral roll. They avoid the total number of deletions. That is to give the country a number intended to mitigate the staggering scale of deletions.

It took time, but the industrial scale of deletions from the electoral rolls through the SIR process is now slowly dawning on the country.

A prominent daily newspaper carried a story headlined, “SIR’s cut 118 million so far: More than Brazil’s ’22 poll turnout”. In order to show the enormity of the deletion, the story said that other than India and China, only 14 countries have a population of over 100 million. It wants the readers to imagine that the scale of SIR deletions amounted to the culling of a few countries from India.

With every phase, the percentage of deletions has been progressively increasing. In the first phase, which was implemented only in Bihar, the deletion was about 8 per cent. In the second phase it was slightly over 13 per cent, and now in the current and third phase, so far it is over 15 per cent.

From several investigative studies it has now come to light that many who were listed as dead are actually alive. Some of them were presented to the Supreme Court soon after the Bihar revision. The Hindu carried out a study of deletions in Tamil Nadu. It found that the age of those listed as dead did not conform to the mortality trends in the official data. In West Bengal many deleted voters listed as dead, shifted, and absent thronged the local government offices and protested.

In Bihar, the electoral roll that was supposed to have been cleaned up had 1.32 crore fake addresses. In the Barachatti Assembly constituency of the State, 877 voters were shown as residing at one address in a village. In Pipra constituency’s Galimpur village, 509 voters were registered at one address. The address was not just wrong. It does not exist. There are several such examples from the State. In all the 243 constituencies, 14.35 lakh duplicate voters were found by investigative journalists. All this was after what the ECI called a “successful” and “satisfactory” conduct of SIR in the State.

Weeding out of infiltrators or foreigners also turns out to be a phoney claim by the ECI. In Bihar the total number of objections raised against suspected foreigners was 1,087, of which only 390 were found to be in order and accepted for verification. Of them only 76 names were of Muslims. And of the 390, 10 were in the Seemanchal region. Of these 10 from Seemanchal, only 5 were Muslims. Of those 5, 2 were dead. Finally, only 3 were identified as foreigners. But the viral propaganda on social media continues to show that thousands of infiltrators have been detected and deleted in several States and are now found running away from the country in droves.

In a bid to allay fears over SIR of electoral rolls, a Muslim jamaath in Edappally has opened a help desk for voters. Volunteers at the help desk, which will run throughout the SIR exercise, help voters fill up the enumeration forms besides offering other necessary support. It also ropes in booth-level officers to create awareness. | Photo Credit: H. Vibhu

If weeding out foreigners and non-citizens was one of the primary objectives of SIR as claimed by the ECI, the most eligible candidate State for conducting the exercise ought to be Assam. If there was ever a State in the Indian Union where citizenship became the most contested issue, it was Assam. But it is ironic that the ECI had decided to do only a Special Revision (SR) in the State, not a Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

The Supreme Court in its judgment of May 27, 2026, has directed that the ECI “shall refer such cases [suspected as foreigners] within four weeks to the Competent Authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955, for adjudication of their citizenship”. It was also reported that the ECI has agreed to submit the list to the competent authority. It is now more than three months since the Supreme Court’s directive. The ECI is yet to make any such list public. This renders the ECI claim of weeding out foreigners from the electoral roll as an objective of SIR highly suspect.

The ECI claimed that SIR was done once before too, in the year 2002. There are millions in the country alive today who were voters in 2002. However, so far nobody in the country recalls having gone to any government official to prove they were eligible to be a voter in 2002-03.

The revision that happened in 2002 was entirely different from what is going on now in the name of SIR. When activists wanted to know the 2002 revision’s guidelines so that they could compare them with the present revision’s guidelines, they sought the information under the Right to Information (RTI) Act. The ECI said in response to the application that it had no copy of the 2002 guidelines. This bizarre response only makes the ECI’s intentions suspect.

There is one more piece of misleading information from the ECI on this. The exercise conducted in 2002 was called Special Revision of an intensive nature. It was not Special Intensive Revision. It required the ECI to do the revision transparently by vetting the revisions against the then existing “mother list”. Those 2002 guidelines mandated that the exercise be carried out openly in gram sabhas and ward committee meetings. Arbitrary revisions had no room in the 2002 revision.

The initial charitable view that the deletions were mainly an outcome of blind bureaucratic processes and insensitiveness of the officials but not due to any particular design is no longer sustainable. Many independent researchers and research institutions, media outlets, and investigative journalists have established it beyond any doubt that names of Muslim and Christian minorities, Dalits, Adivasis, economically marginalised sections, illiterate people, daily wage workers, and migrant labourers were deleted in large numbers, disproportionate to their percentages in the previous electoral roll. From among these sections, deletion of women voters was even higher.

Women waiting in the queue to cast their votes during the last phase of the Assembly Elections in Kindui village of Bihar in November 2025. The SIR process disproportionately affects migrants, workers, Dalits, Adivasis, minorities, women and other economically marginalised groups. | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy

The SIR deletions fail the demographic test. In all these States, the number of voters after the final revised electoral roll falls short of the size of the adult population in those States. Since ours is a democracy based on universal adult franchise, the number of voters should be equivalent to the adult population in a State. If a State’s adult population is 100, hypothetically, the number of voters in that State ought to be 100, ideally. If it is 99 or 101, one can accommodate that number. But it is unacceptable to have 70 or 130 voters in the final revised list. In Uttar Pradesh, the final number of voters after SIR falls short of the State’s adult population by a little shy of 3 crore. In Bihar, the figure is about 80 lakh.

SIR has a troubling consequence. It is not difficult to understand that every political party will address only the interests, concerns, and priorities of those who have a right to vote. Only they matter to political parties. As we have understood the drift of the SIR deletions, most of those who retain the right to vote are likely to be savarna Hindus, if not in the immediate present, then eventually at any rate. We need to keep in mind that the present SIR is unlikely to be the last one. We cannot rule out the possibility that SIR becomes unstoppable once it is normalised in the way that it is now being normalised and even accepted. There is a probability that we will regularly have such SIR exercises that would progressively eliminate the so-called unwanted and impure elements from our political society. After many iterations of SIR, the polity will be fully purged of those unwanted elements.

Those non-Hindus and non-savarna Hindus who might still retain their right to vote will be rendered a politically inconsequential minority. Even without the SIR the ruling party at the Centre is able to have a Council of Ministers without a single member belonging to the Muslim and Christian minorities. In the entire history of our independent Republic, we never had a Union Council of Ministers that did not have a Muslim and a Christian representative. Even after SIR, if any minorities and non-savarna Hindus still remain with franchise, they will still be made politically inconsequential by the process of delimitation. Assam and Jammu and Kashmir showed the way on how to pack and crack the constituencies by implementing delimitation to make such unwanted populations irrelevant in electoral outcomes.

If that is the situation now, imagine what would be the political significance of these sections of our society in the wake of a fully implemented SIR. The present ruling dispensation could mobilise behind itself a high level of Hindu majoritarian consolidation. In the wake of SIR that would be the only political society that is going to remain for every political party in the country to operate in. That would mean Hindu-isation, or rather “savarna Hindu-isation”, of our polity. This would result in every political party ending up as a Hindu majoritarian party, some more and some less. But all of them Hindu majoritarian, nevertheless.

The die would be cast; the pitch would be set; the political turf in the country would be transformed. Every political party, if it has to be electorally successful or even stay relevant in that customised political society and that transformed turf, would have to play like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). They would be compelled to adopt the programme of the BJP, would perhaps even be forced to be more BJP-like than the present BJP itself.

In the medium to long term, the consequences of SIR would make every political party like the BJP. In other words, every political party in the country would be BJP-ised.

We already see religious symbols of the majority gradually creeping up to the status of quasi-state symbols. Not long ago we had seen the spectacle of several Hindu religious men parade along with a symbol of monarchy, the sengol, in our democratic Republic’s newly built Parliament House. Not long after a marathon debate on “Vande Mataram”, the government issued an order that all six stanzas of the song be rendered at every official function of the Central government. On this Independence Day, at the Red Fort, for the first time “Vande Mataram” was played. We are also witness to government schemes getting names that clearly allude to Hindu scriptures, godheads, and epics. Renaming MGNREGA to call it VB-G RAM G is the most prominent example.

This process is worryingly close to the political culture of Israel. The Jewish state is unapologetic about having Jewish religious symbols as its state symbols. The Star of David is on its national flag. All major, dominant, and electorally consequential political parties in that country serve only Jewish interests, addresse only Jewish aspirations, heed only Jewish concerns, anxieties, and Zionist priorities. They are barely distinguishable from one another on core issues. They, in fact, work to outdo each other in competing for Jewish support and to champion Jewish interests, as well as in displaying their indifference and antipathy to non-Jewish, Palestinian concerns. The state takes on no obligation to the well-being of non-Jews.

The SIR process that is now underway, if unchecked, will make India go the Israeli way. In other words, what we see today is a steady Israel-isation of India’s polity.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Yad Vashem in Israel on February 26, 2026. | Photo Credit: @IsraeliPM/ANI Photo

The rapid unfolding of these two phenomena is unmistakable: BJP-isation of political parties on the one hand and Israel-isation of Indian polity on the other; both proceeding in lockstep.

This is dismantling the idea of India as a secular, plural, and federal state that pledged itself to delivering liberty, equality, justice, and fraternity to its people and to foster a humane society. The idea of India embedded in our 1947 tryst with destiny and the political compact that is enshrined in our 1950 Constitution are now in mortal danger.

The secular, plural, democratic conception of India has been the target of unrelenting assaults from the body of individuals and several other past-worshipping obscurantist platforms for over a century. They have been openly and doggedly championing an unequal social order. Their project is to seek India’s future in its past; to recover from that imaginary past a fabricated pristine glory; to turn the secular, democratic Republic into a culturally, linguistically, religiously homogenised nation. The notion of Indian civilisation as a synthesis, and as a palimpsest, is abhorrent to them. Their project’s notion of India seeks to obliterate the rich diversity of cultures, languages, lifestyles, eating habits, sartorial practices, ways of worship, and syncretism that the country is blessed with. A flattened India is their notion of a “civilisational” state.

SIR is but one key element in a grand project that seeks to assert exclusive Hindu ownership of the Indian nation, to make that Hindu-owned nation the sole rightful resident in the territory of the Indian state—and turn it into a Hindu nation state, a Hindu Rashtra. It seeks to redefine the country’s identity as “Hindu nation state”. In that configuration “savarna” is deliberately muted and made illegible for the time being for tactical reasons.

Eventually, when the constraints are broken, it would be unveiled as a full-blooded, unapologetic, wall-to-wall “savarna Hindu Rashtra”.

When India became a Republic, the founding parents made it a home for everyone who lived in its territory. Membership of the Republic, or citizenship, was not predicated on religion, caste, gender, language, culture, region of residence, colour, economic status, educational qualifications, and such other attributes. Everyone who chose India as their land of residence was a citizen and also a voter. Denominational attributes did not privilege one or the other as rightful owners of the nation. Everyone was.

Europe went through a different experience when nation states were formed. There were people who rightfully belonged and those who were others or minorities. That was the basis of the European nation states. There were majorities and minorities. Minorities’ residence was predicated on their becoming tolerable to the majorities. European countries, and countries which adopted that model of building their nation states, either subjugated minorities, pushed them out of their territories, or even exterminated them. Beginning from the cleansing of the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century until the ethnic cleansing that Israel carries out today, history is witness to many bloody attempts to forge homogenised nations.

But India chose a different path. The founding parents designed the country’s collective life in a way that the state gave room for everyone, despite their diversity, to live together and thrive.

But ideologies in the country that continue to draw their inspiration from the European nation-owned state concept want the Indian Republic too to be turned into a state owned by one nation—the Hindu nation. In their conception of a Republic, the others needed to be assimilated to the point of obliterating their respective identities, pushed out of the territory of the nation state, or exterminated through genocide. In present-day India, both the pushing out and physical extermination of unassimilated minorities are impractical.

However, extermination of a political kind of the “others” is possible. Instead of exterminating the citizen, citizenship could be exterminated. SIR is the weapon forged for that kind of extermination. It exterminates citizenship of those unwanted elements by exterminating their franchise. It is clear that without franchise, citizenship is hollow, without substance. Disenfranchisement hollows out citizenship. Therefore, SIR is nothing but a bloodless political genocide. It is an instrument to achieve the “purification” of the nation, not just the electoral roll. It exterminates citizenship, pushes people out of the political society, and makes people stateless even as they continue to live within the borders of the Indian state.

The idea of India as a home to diverse peoples, cultures, languages, and religions is being dismantled at a fiendish pace. SIR is tasked to accomplish this.

Parakala Prabhakar is a political economist and the author of The Crooked Timber of New India.