Delhi protests over India's voter roll deletions met with mass detentions

Over the weekend in New Delhi, thousands of protesters who called for the resignation of India's chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, faced mass detentions and a heavy police crackdown. The demonstrations brought together youth activists and opposition parties and centred on the removal of more than 130 million names from India's electoral rolls — a controversy an Al Jazeera opinion piece argues is hollowing out Indian democracy.

The deletions stem from the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) carried out by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The commission revises electoral rolls periodically to add new voters and remove those who have died or permanently moved away; the previous intensive revision was completed in 2003-2004. The article argues the current exercise is unprecedented in scale, in what it describes as the arbitrariness and overreach of its procedures, and in the disenfranchisement it has produced.

How the process worked

According to the opinion article, the ECI initially left the government-issued Aadhaar card off the list of documents accepted for voter verification, saying it was "overinclusive". The article says the commission then created a category called "logical discrepancy" during the West Bengal revision, which accounted for 2.7 million of the nearly nine million names removed in the state. Voters were asked for educational certificates, land records, legacy documents and family trees. An AI-enabled application, ERONET, compared voters' details with older rolls and flagged mismatches in names and family relationships, the piece says. With only 19 specially constituted tribunals to hear more than 3.8 million appeals, the article says the correction process remained inaccessible to many excluded voters.

Who was affected

The article states the deletions fell disproportionately on Muslims, women, migrants and other marginalised communities. In Bengal, Muslims reportedly made up about 65 percent of the 2.7 million people removed on "logical discrepancy" grounds. In Hyderabad, 1.94 million names were marked for deletion under an "absent, shifted, dead and duplicate" category; an estimated 40.7 percent of those entries appeared to belong to Muslim voters, compared with Muslims' 30 percent share of the city's population, and up to 80 percent in some Old City constituencies. In the National Capital Region, nearly one-third of the existing electorate was missing from the draft roll, the piece says.

Political fallout

Both the ECI and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have defended the exercise using the language of "purification", the article notes. It points to Bihar, where the RJD-led alliance lost to the BJP-led alliance by 0.03 percentage points of vote share in 2020; in 2025, after 6.8 million names were removed and 2.1 million added, the BJP alliance's lead widened to nearly nine percentage points, according to the piece. It also says analysis of the 2026 Bengal Assembly elections points to SIR deletions playing a decisive role. It adds that the newly elected BJP governments in Bihar and Bengal moved to deny Public Distribution System benefits to people whose names were expunged.

The piece compares the SIR with the Supreme Court-supervised National Register of Citizens in Assam, which left 1.9 million residents, mostly Bengali speakers, essentially stateless, and with the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act. It also cites the recently established High-Level Committee on Demographic Change. Al Jazeera notes that the views are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect its editorial stance.

Source: Al Jazeera.