Indian voters fight to get back on electoral rolls

About 130 million names removed under voter roll revision

NEW DELHI:

Kamta Prasad has been shuttling between government offices in Delhi trying to prove he is not dead.

The 53-year-old tailor is among 130 million names removed from India's electoral rolls under a voter roll revision that has sparked mass protests and posed the biggest challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has led to removals for reasons ranging from "logical discrepancies" to people being recorded as dead, leaving many such as Prasad struggling to get more than just their voting status restored.

He has had to forgo his daily wage of 250 rupees ($2.63) that supports his family of four to scurry around the city to reverse the error.

"I panicked when I heard about it," said Prasad, who is among 4.2 million Delhi voters struck off the list, according to the draft rolls published by the poll body on August 31. "Since then I've been going everywhere to prove that I'm alive."

The deletions have triggered a political storm, with opposition parties and youth groups staging near-daily protests in New Delhi and elsewhere, which have been met with force by the police.

They allege Election Commission chief Gyanesh Kumar manipulated the revision to benefit Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, a charge denied by both the commission and the BJP.

According to Rajendra Kumar, a volunteer with non-profit Jan Sarokar, about 2,000 of the roughly 9,000 voters in Prasad's block were struck off after the revision, classified as absent, shifted, deceased or registered elsewhere.

Prasad is the only person in this block who has been declared dead but several similar cases have been reported by local media across the country.