The repressive effort sought to deter a planned protest at Jantar Mantar, a traditional protest site in New Delhi. The protest centered on two core demands: the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner and the rollback of a nationwide process known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
The troubles truly began in the summer of 2025. Several Indian states were about to hold elections for their state legislatures. Ahead of those elections, the Election Commission announced an electoral revision in those states, citing the need to “clean up” electoral rolls. Numerous voters would be required to prove that they were citizens and entitled to be on the rolls by producing one or more documents from a select list. Election Commission officials would scrutinize the documents and either accept or reject them.
The petitioners also argued that Election Commission’s list of acceptable documents was exclusionary and would result in large scale disenfranchisement. In India, access to documents issued by the government depends heavily on caste, class and gender. Many people simply lack necessary documents or the ability to navigate the bureaucracy to obtain them.
But even as the legal debates continued, exclusions from electoral rolls mounted. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had never won a state election, nine million people—around 12% percent of the electorate—found themselves excluded from the rolls.
The West Bengal election went ahead using the new electoral rolls and the BJP won. One indication of how flawed the SIR may have been was that around 90% of the voters in West Bengal, whose appeals were decided, were eventually restored to the rolls. Nine out of every ten excluded voters had been wrongfully removed. Yet even as exclusions numbered in the millions in each state, the Supreme Court noted that the data did not indicate “systemic disenfranchisement.”
Unchecked bureaucrats
A central argument against the exercise was that by requiring every elector, including those already on the electoral rolls, to prove their eligibility afresh, the Election Commission was treating each individual as presumptively ineligible to vote. This was a grossly disproportionate exercise of power, particularly because more proportionate methods were available to the election commission.
The consequences soon became apparent: the new BJP government in West Bengal threatened, on more than one occasion, to cut off welfare benefits for people excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR. Although the Supreme Court noted that the SIR was not meant to determine citizenship, by the summer of 2026, that distinction was becoming difficult to sustain.
In 2020, the Indian government’s attempts to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC) had been widely criticized because of how it would force every individual to prove their citizenship to state authorities, and lead to widespread exclusion. After widespread protests across the country against it, the NRC was shelved. The SIR now appeared to be a way of introducing the NRC through the backdoor.
Other disturbing facts also came to light. In certain neighborhoods, people had submitted pre-filled forms in bulk, seeking to have Muslims removed from off the electoral rolls by questioning their citizenship. India’s electoral law allows third parties to object to anyone’s inclusion on the electoral rolls.
A tenacious reporter
Against this backdrop, an investigative report by Ritika Chopra, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper in the last week of September, landed like a bombshell. Her report showed that although the Election Commission’s decisions were supposed to be taken by consensus among its three commissioners, the chief election commissioner had been taking them unilaterally, often over the objections of, and sometimes without involving, the other commissioners. (The Election Commission responded by describing differing “views and observations” as part of “deliberation in any institution.”)
These reports crystallized latent anger, particularly against the chief election commissioner. Under Indian electoral law, election commissioners are appointed by a committee in which the political executive holds a two-to-one majority; they are, in effect, executive appointments. The Supreme Court’s 2023 attempt to reform this system was bypassed by subsequent legislation. The court then left a challenge to that legislation on the back burner. All of this explains why the chief election commissioner became the primary focus of public anger.
It is difficult to see how this story ends. The right to vote is hard won and its loss keenly felt. History shows that once people lose confidence in the institutions meant to protect that right, restoring their trust is exceedingly difficult. A long shadow hangs over electoral integrity in India. Lifting it will require urgent, systemic reforms. Whether those reforms will come remains uncertain.
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