’How do you explain the deletion of 130 million names?’ Why Indian voters are on the streets

Anger at electoral roll changes has boiled over, sparking a crisis for Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.

Born into a small village in West Bengal, Shahida Fakir had always taken her vote for granted. That was, until it was suddenly taken away. She presented officials with her Indian birth certificate and family land documents from the village going back to 1962. Both her parents had been on the electoral roll for decades, so she showed proof of that too. But when the final revised voter list came out in April, Fakir was not on it.

The 38-year-old migrant worker, born into a poor Muslim family, was not alone. Since last year, 130 million names – more than the population of Japan – have been removed from India’s electoral roll through a process known as SIR, or special intensive revision. In the nearly eight decades since India’s independence, never have the voter rolls shrunk by such a huge amount over such a short time.

The Narendra Modi government has called SIR a legitimate exercise to clean up the electoral rolls. Overseen by the election commission, tens of millions of dead and duplicate names have been removed. Yet so have the names of millions of living Indian citizens. Critics allege that the pledge to “purify” India’s voter roll of illegal immigrants has instead been used for more sinister purposes – disenfranchising tens of millions of Muslims, other minorities, and poor and lower caste communities, who are largely not BJP voters.

In a matter of weeks, nationwide anger at SIR has boiled up and spilled out onto the streets of India’s biggest cities, presenting a formidable challenge to the government. Over the weekend, Delhi was transformed into a high-security fortress of barricades, roadblocks, and tens of thousands of police and paramilitaries who detained thousands of people as they attempted to stop youth-led protests calling for the man who oversaw SIR, the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, to step down immediately.

On Monday, opposition parties – who have decried SIR as a “weapon for vote theft” by the Modi government – drew tens of thousands of supporters as they marched through the capital and presented a petition to the supreme court, demanding Kumar’s resignation. The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) movement, which was behind the call for Saturday’s action, has vowed to “fight on” in their protests against SIR.

Opposition and civil society leaders allege that SIR has already given the BJP an electoral advantage in states such as Bihar and West Bengal, claims the party denied. Others say the exercise has had even more concerning implications: under changes to SIR unilaterally implemented by Kumar, the election commission has become the arbiter of Indian citizenship, a sweeping overreach of its remit.