India’s electoral roll revision threatens democracy and Muslims, say critics | India

India’s political opposition has warned that democracy is under threat from a controversial practice of reviewing voter registration across the country that critics say will disenfranchise minority voters and consolidate the power of the ruling Narendra Modi government.

Last week, a debate broke out in the Indian parliament over the special intensive revision (SIR) process, which is taking place in nine states and three union territories and is one of the biggest revisions to the country’s electoral rolls in decades.

Ostensibly a bureaucratic exercise to update the list of citizens eligible to vote, India’s opposition leaders have instead claimed that the SIR is being used as a secret “citizenship survey” by the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). State leaders claimed it was used to disenfranchise poor and minority voters, especially Muslims, as “illegal immigrants” and manipulate voter rolls to benefit the Modi government.

The BJP openly embraces the Hindu nationalist ideology that aims to transform India from a secular to a secular state. Hindu Rashtra, or the Hindu nation. During the party’s 11 years in power, its policies and rhetoric sharply polarized the country along religious lines and led to increased anti-Muslim hostility. The BJP has gained unprecedented power over state institutions and its ruling alliance rules 21 out of 28 states.

In states such as West Bengal, critics claim that it is primarily Muslims who face the threat of disenfranchisement and deportation by the SIR, while Bangladeshi Hindus living illegally in India say they are assured of citizenship.

Speaking in parliament last week, Rahul Gandhi, a leader of India’s largest opposition party, the Congress, claimed that the SIR was part of a broader project by the BJP to carry out “voting”. curry [theft]” and destroy the long-standing integrity of India’s democratic elections since independence.

Claiming that there was significant evidence of foul play in voting processes in multiple state elections in recent months, Gandhi said: “When you destroy voting, you destroy the fabric of this country, you destroy modern India, you destroy the idea of ​​India,” which has been repeatedly denied by the BJP.

The opposition alleged that the SIR was being used as a secret national register of citizens (NRC), similar to what happened in the northern Indian state of Assam a few years ago. There, the NRC led to hundreds of thousands of people, primarily Muslims, being rounded up and detained in detention centers or forced to face citizenship courts, and some were deported to Bangladesh.

The BJP has denied any irregularities in the SIR process, saying it was a routine administrative practice to “cleanse” the voter rolls of “leaks”, a term that mostly refers to Muslims arriving illegally from neighboring Bangladesh.

Replying to Gandhi in Parliament, home minister Amit Shah said the BJP was protecting India’s democracy with a policy of “detection, deletion and deportation”. “Can democracy be safe in a country where the prime minister and prime minister are determined by illegal immigrants?” he added.

The election commission (EC), the government body that conducted the survey, said the SIR was a way to ensure that deceased, illegitimate and duplicate voters were removed from the electoral rolls. However, in parliament, Gandhi accused the EC of being controlled by the BJP and of “colluding with those in power to shape the elections”.

The SIR had already caused significant backlash and a number of legal challenges when it was implemented in Bihar, a state of 130 million people, earlier this year. As a result, more than 6.5 million people were removed from the voter list. The EC claimed this was because they had died or moved elsewhere, but many of them turned out to be alive, leading to millions of complaints.

Opposition parties claimed that most of those suspended were Muslims or belonged to communities that do not form the vote bank of the Hindu nationalist BJP, while other names were added incorrectly, a claim the EC rejected. Following the completion of the SIR process, the BJP won the Bihar state elections held in November with a historic landslide.

Nowhere has SIR been more controversial than in the state of West Bengal, which borders Bangladesh with a large number of Muslims.

The ruling Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) government, led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, has described the SIR as a “politically motivated” process “to capture West Bengal by fraud”. West Bengal is one of the few states where the BJP has failed to gain political traction so far, but state elections are due to be held next year.

Banerjee also alleged that the “shadow of fear and uncertainty” cast by the SIR has led to panic and distress among the public, creating widespread fear among Muslims in the state that they will lose their citizenship. The TMC linked the SIR stress to the large number of deaths and suicides in the state in recent weeks and Banerjee wrote to the EC to intervene and stop the process.

Among those left under extreme stress was Jahir Mal, who lives with his wife and children in a mud-walled, plastic-roofed hut in Khalisani, 25 miles (40km) west of Kolkata. After news of the election overhaul spread, his family said, he began watching SIR-related videos on Facebook warning of mass deportations, then stopped going to work and isolated himself from his family and neighbors.

An illiterate Muslim worker feared that since he was not on the electoral list, he would immediately be considered an illegal citizen by the SIR, despite being born in India.

“He kept asking, ‘What will I do if they send me to Bangladesh? I have no connections there,'” his wife, Rejina, recalled. “I begged him to calm down and assured him that nothing would happen… But he didn’t listen.

“On November 4, SIR officials were scheduled to arrive at 10 a.m. to check the documents. My husband took his own life at 9 a.m. when no one was home.” Now Rejina is left alone with her three young children and the sole breadwinner of the family is gone. “I don’t know how we’re going to survive. I’m broken,” he said.

The government rejected SIR’s claim that it discriminated against Muslims. But critics have pointed to provocative comments by local BJP leaders such as Suvendu Adhikari, who said Hindus fleeing persecution in Bangladesh were “welcome” and would receive citizenship under a controversial law passed by the BJP in 2019, while Muslims from the same country were “infiltrators” whose names would be identified and deleted.

Bangladeshi Hindus living in India without verified documents have been assured by local BJP leaders that the SIR will not lead to their detention or deportation as spies despite their illegal status, the Guardian has been told.

Bikash Das, a Hindu from Bangladesh, said he came to India 10 years ago and managed to get an Indian ID and vote in the last two elections despite not being an official citizen. He said SIR initially caused concern that he and his family would be deported. “Then some local BJP leaders assured us that we would definitely be given Indian citizenship,” he said.

The SIR process has also sparked anger and protests in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala, which have been ruled by opposition parties for decades and where the BJP is trying to make headway in the elections.

In Tamil Nadu, the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party has officially opposed the practice. In Kerala, the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led government passed a resolution against the SIR and condemned it as a backdoor “citizenship survey”.

Although it was scheduled to be completed in early December, the SIR deadline for many states has been delayed by several weeks. Final voter lists are expected to be published in February 2026.