India has initiated a massive overhaul of its voter registry, an exercise that critics fear could lead to widespread disenfranchisement across the world’s largest democracy.
This comprehensive, three-month drive, officially termed the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), recently kicked off across 12 states and territories, many of which are slated to hold local elections next year. The effort involves an expansive deployment, with tens of thousands of election officials and nearly half a million volunteers traveling door-to-door. Their mandate is to assist residents in completing necessary enumeration forms and ensuring they are properly submitted, according to the head of the national Election Commission.
Concerns about the fairness of the process stem from a similar revision conducted earlier this year in Bihar, a state home to more than 130 million people. That exercise resulted in the removal of approximately 6.5 million names ahead of state elections.
Authorities stated these exclusions were necessary to prevent “foreign illegal immigrants” from participating. The ruling party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has long claimed that undocumented Muslim migrants from neighboring Bangladesh fraudulently register as voters.
However, critics argue vehemently that the stringent documentation requirements inherent in the SIR process often result in genuine Indian citizens being wrongly struck off the rolls. Activists have documented alarming instances of living voters being declared deceased and entire families being inexplicably removed from draft lists.
To mitigate some documentation worries, the Supreme Court ruled in August that the widely used biometric-linked Aadhaar identity card could be accepted as valid proof of identity for the process.
The latest SIR drive will focus intensively on key states, including the most populous, Uttar Pradesh (estimated 199 million residents), as well as West Bengal (91 million), Tamil Nadu (72 million), and Kerala (33 million).
Unsurprisingly, several rights groups and opposition parties have mounted legal challenges against the operation. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin, whose party is actively fighting the measure in the Supreme Court, branded the exercise a “mere trick to delete the names of genuine voters.” He stressed the foundational threat to democracy, arguing that “Voting is the body and soul of democracy, and that right is facing a threat.”
The updated and finalized electoral roll is currently scheduled for release on February 7, 2026.
