Dukhi, his father, warns him against it. “It is still my right,” Narayan replies. “And I will exercise it in the next election, I promise you.”
“Life without dignity is worthless,” Narayan replies.
A nascent Gen-Z movement, Cockroach Janta Party, which organized protests over education and unemployment in Delhi in June and July and forced the resignation of India’s higher education minister, gave the call for the October protests. Young protestors answered with an insurrectionary energy in the summer and soon found support from a broader coalition comprised of opposition parties, social movements and other pillars of Indian civil society.
Known as the Special Intensive Revision, the exercise has, according to the protestors, resulted in more than 130 million voters being removed from electoral lists. Although electoral rolls have been revised periodically, this is the first time such an exercise has placed the burden on citizens to establish their eligibility, raising fears that millions of legitimate voters, particularly the poor and marginalized, could be disenfranchised.
Already shaken by the summer protests over education, this time the Indian government responded with coercive force, effectively turning central Delhi, the political and administrative heart of the capital, and the place where India goes to protest, into a garrison. On Oct. 10, it deployed tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel, restricted internet access, detained thousands of protesters, and sought to deny the protesters access to public spaces across the capital.
Bora was detained by the police on their way to join the thousands of protesters who had converged on Connaught Place, a prominent commercial district in the capital, waving the national flag and reiterating demands to protect the right to vote and the sanctity of electoral democracy in India. For several hours after sunset, there was no news of the whereabouts of Bora, who uses they/them pronouns. Their lawyers spoke about the police refusing to reveal their location. Eventually, around midnight, their lawyers located them at a police station.
Members of the Cockroach Janta Party take part in a protest march on October 16, 2026 in New Delhi, India. —Ritesh Shukla—Getty Images
The emotional charge behind the protests has its roots in the birth of the modern Indian nation-state itself. India always took great pride in adopting universal franchise rights as the Constitution of India came into effect on Jan. 26, 1950. In its historic first general elections in 1952, every Indian above the age of 21, irrespective of caste, religion, gender, race or wealth, had their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. It was, as many legal and constitutional scholars have since remarked, a colossal feat, and one that became a touchstone for the modern idea of India.
The fear is that India is—to put it bluntly—being yanked back to a darker time, one from which it emerged in no small part because of the work done over decades to firmly establish the credibility and broaden the depth of its democratic franchise. In the 1950s, India was an overwhelmingly rural country, with around 83% of its population living in the villages and only about 17% in urban areas. Its nascent democratic system confronted entrenched social hierarchies of caste and power. Early accounts of grassroots democracy in India describe how higher-caste landowners controlled the votes of their lower-caste dependents, sometimes even marking ballots that the voters had to authenticate with their thumbprints.
And well into the 1960s, millions of Indians were still unable to exercise their constitutional right to vote. In the eastern Indian state of Bihar, landlords used club-wielding enforcers known as lathaits to keep Dalits, members of the most oppressed caste, out of polling booths. “I remember watching members of my caste being dragged out of a polling booth,” an elderly Dalit man in Bihar’s Siwan district recalled in an interview with The Print, an Indian news site.
The power of the vote in Indian consciousness transformed radically after the “Emergency,” the period between June 1975 and March 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended constitutional rights, assumed untrammeled powers, imprisoned opposition leaders and silenced the press. Much of India’s elite—bureaucrats, businessmen, newspaper editors and movie stars—bent the knee and welcomed Mrs. Gandhi’s promise of “order” and “discipline.” Wealth and connections offered protection from the state. India’s poor, stripped of their electoral power, suffered terrible abuses of an unaccountable bureaucracy and police from slum demolitions to forced sterilization of men.
The power of the vote has gradually forced India’s high-handed bureaucracy to recognize the human dignity and political citizenship of ordinary people. The electorate delivered its verdict on Mrs. Gandhi’s breach of the sacred covenant between the Indian state and its people: the people confer legitimacy on the state in exchange for their rights, including its protection of the sanctity of the vote. Having asserted their power, voters proved difficult to subdue again. As the political theorist Partha Chatterjee put it, it was the 1977 defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the Congress party that established the “capacity of the vote.”
A silent revolution
By the 1990s, political leaders from socially disenfranchised castes and Dalit communities were taking power in the populous, northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot memorably described it as “the silent revolution.” This revolution, ushered in by the votes of the historically oppressed communities, did not quite transform the economic and social structures of the region. But it changed the everyday relations of power. Indrajit Roy, a scholar of development studies, recalled a refrain he heard frequently during his fieldwork among Dalits in Bihar in the late 2000s: “There has been development, change has come. Today, we can look the landlord in the eye and speak as equals.”
Over time, the clientelist politics of vote banks became associated with an entrenched culture of corruption. This helped pave the way for Modi’s successful national campaign in 2014, in which he cast himself as a populist strongman who embodied the aspirations for “development” of all Indians while portraying the Congress and regional parties as beholden to their respective vote banks. Modi’s attacks on vote bank politics also carried a more sinister charge: that successive governments had appeased India’s Muslims minority, which accounts for around 14% of the population, for their votes at the expense of the national interest.
The Modi government invoked that very specter of the “illegal, Bangladeshi Muslim” to push through revisions to electoral rolls across most Indian states. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, who had earlier likened Bangladeshi immigrants to “termites,” responded to the ongoing protests by calling them an “action plan to protect infiltrators.”
Yet the Indian government has used unfounded speculation about “illegal” Bangladeshis to overturn the fundamental logic of the country’s electoral registration system, shifting the burden of ensuring registration from the Election Commission to the voter herself. The commission was responsible for ensuring that every citizen made it onto the electoral rolls.
Opposition parties have also alleged that the electoral roll revisions tilted the electoral field in the BJP’s favor in the West Bengal election held earlier this year, helping the party win power in the state for the first time. An analysis by the SABAR Institute, a public policy research institute, lent some credence to that charge: a disproportionate share of the 9.08 million voters removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls came from constituencies held by the then-ruling Trinamool Congress or those with large Muslim populations.
Voting carries an almost existential significance for Indians whose equal citizenship has not been fully recognized by the institutions of the state. Indians see the vote as an affirmation of their existence. If the vote is no longer a gift freely given or withdrawn by the people but a resource controlled by the state, it reduces ordinary voters once again to supplicants dependent on the favor of political elites.
We that are young
The young protesters moving through Delhi’s barricaded streets carry a palpable sense that they are living through a historical moment. References to the Quit India movement against the country’s erstwhile British colonizers and the protests around the Emergency have become commonplace. Memories of seminal events of the past offer a lens through which to consider the present. The future seems open to change through collective action. This sense of a turning point imbues individual actions with a larger purpose and drives protesters to confront a police force intent on clearing the streets by whatever means necessary.
The convergence of young people’s anger over education and employment, fears of authoritarianism, and concern for the sanctity of the vote poses a serious challenge to the Modi government. It could forge a broad popular coalition of unemployed young people, urban poor, Dalits and religious minorities, united in challenging the legitimacy of the government. Unless the government retreats on electoral roll revisions, sustained protests could drain its political capital.
One of Indian democracy’s great achievements is that even its poorest citizens have proved adept at recognizing when the power of their vote is being wrested away, gauging the consequences and organizing to resist. A government in India can retain its legitimacy despite failing to provide functioning schools or decent employment. It cannot do so if it also violates the sanctity of the vote.
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