More than 130 million names have disappeared from India’s voter rolls since last year, according to reporting by The New York Times, a revision of the world’s largest electoral register that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government describes as routine housekeeping and that critics say will lead to depriving eligible voters of their democratic right.
The Election Commission says the exercise is meant to eliminate duplicate entries, deceased voters and other ineligible names from a register of roughly a billion people. However, the poll body has not published a breakdown of the changes made to the lists by district or reason, and it has not said how many voters who appealed have been restored. Independent researchers say they cannot yet verify either the government’s account or the opposition’s charge that the removal of names was aimed at voters less likely to support Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government.
By early October the argument had moved from paperwork to the streets. Demonstrations demanding the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, met mass detentions, restrictions on movement and the suspension of mobile services in parts of India’s capital. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 43 journalists were temporarily detained while covering the protests on October 10 and 11. Several said they were beaten, had equipment seized or were forced to delete footage. Amnesty International and three other human rights groups called for the release of those held arbitrarily and an investigation into alleged abuses by security forces. But much of this has fallen on deaf ears in New Delhi.
Those who have been observing the situation have two questions that they believe sit at the center of the debate, and neither has an easy answer. What happens when citizens cannot be confident their names will stay on the register? And what happens when journalists trying to establish whether the process is fair are stopped from reporting what they see? That said, declaring India’s democracy dead, as some critics would like, settles nothing, and nor does accepting that everything is routine.
The politics of a missing name
With roughly a billion registered voters in the country, removing 130 million names amounts to a substantial change to the record through which people exercise their rights.
The Times reported on October 7 that about 20 million people had been marked dead while still alive, and described allegations that the revision fell disproportionately on Muslims, a minority often disliked by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Two senior party officials, speaking anonymously, said the exercise had been designed to strengthen the party’s electoral advantage. For its part, the Indian Election Commission says the revision improves accuracy by removing dead, duplicate and otherwise ineligible entries. Updating registers is legitimate work, lists cannot stay accurate indefinitely, and piles of outdated records can themselves undermine democratic confidence. So the question is not whether lists should be revised, but whether the process is transparent and fair, and whether the people affected have a realistic chance to challenge a wrong deletion.
What the revision has changed, according to The Times’s account, is where the burden of proof now sits. Instead of officials checking records and confirming a name before removing it, the process has removed first and left people to appeal afterward.
From disputed records to street protests
The protests that gathered force in October were driven by demands for accountability from the Election Commission, including calls for the chief election commissioner to step down. The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party, student groups and opposition parties helped mobilize them.
The response to the protests has become a concern in its own right. Ahead of the October 10 march, authorities restricted gatherings, suspended transport and limited movement into parts of New Delhi. Amnesty reported more than 10,000 people detained across the country before the rally, many while traveling to the capital, thousands more were reportedly held during the protests, though the figures do not show how many stayed in custody. Police were deployed in large numbers and mobile services were cut in parts of central Delhi, while demonstrators were intercepted before reaching Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site, and taken to temporary detention facilities. Some restrictions may have been justified by specific security concerns, but a blanket approach raises a serious question: whether the Modi government was answering a genuine threat to order or using public-order powers to stop people assembling at all. Amnesty and its partners argued that the right to peaceful assembly should not depend on police permission, and called for the release of those held solely for exercising their rights, along with investigations into allegations of excessive force, ill-treatment and sexual harassment.
According to the Indian Constitution, expression and peaceful assembly are protected, subject to lawful restriction. But lawful restriction is not unlimited discretion, and a demonstration declared unlawful does not make everyone detained at it a criminal. How restrictions are imposed, why, and whether courts can be reached all matter. A democracy’s commitment to order, experts say, is tested not by whether it can stop a crowd gathering, but by whether it can do so without suppressing lawful dissent it finds inconvenient.
Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which allows temporary restrictions in the interest of public order, drew attention during this period. Amnesty argues such powers are being used against peaceful demonstrations. The orders issued, the circumstances the police cited and the way the restrictions were enforced are all matters of record. What makes the Indian case worth watching is that it is not unusual. Governments elsewhere reach for public order when protests challenge their decisions, and the temptation grows when the decision being protested is one the government would rather not debate or take. Experts who study protest policing say the pattern is common across democracies, with restrictions justified on grounds of order that would be hard to defend if applied to other kinds of assembly. According to them, the legal authority to restrict is not, by itself evidence that the restriction was necessary or proportionate.
When reporters become the story
For journalists covering the October demonstrations, the experience was not only witnessing police action, in many cases they were the target of it. The CPJ’s investigation, updated on October 15, documented the temporary detention of dozens of journalists in New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune and Mumbai over two days, drawing on news reports, interviews and verified posts by reporters, editors and newsrooms. Several stated they were held despite showing press credentials. Others described being dragged into police vehicles, assaulted, threatened or obstructed while filming. At least five were struck by police, according to accounts the New York-based press freedom organization reviewed. Phones and equipment were seized, and at least one journalist said he was forced to delete footage.
Rana Ayyub, a columnist for The Washington Post, told the CPJ that police beat her with a baton after she questioned their conduct, and that the injuries still hurt. Ryan Thomas, an assistant multimedia producer at The Caravan, was filming a detention when officers dragged him onto a bus despite his visible press card, he said they hit him repeatedly on the head, slapped him and prodded his stomach with a gun butt before releasing him. Mohammed Aslam Hussain and Sheikh Abdul Mukarram of Siasat Daily said police took their phones, broke their microphone and returned the handsets with the data wiped. All of this needs independent investigation, and individual accounts should be checked against footage, medical records, witnesses and complaints. But the numbers, the similarities and the circumstances make the episode hard to wave away as a series of unrelated misunderstandings.
On October 11 the Supreme Court secured assurances from the solicitor general, Tushar Mehta, that lawyers, journalists and other professionals would not be restricted, and directed that nobody be detained except by procedure established by law. The CPJ reported that detentions continued regardless. Delhi Police, for its part, offered a different account, as reported by the media. A senior officer told The Hindu that some journalists may have been held because they were working close to protesters and did not move away, and that some protesters had posed as reporters. That claim deserves examination and police have a real interest in telling reporters from participants, but a press card cannot become something officers may disregard at will. Where an officer believes someone is obstructing police or breaking the law, the grounds should be specific, lawful and open to challenge, press freedom experts noted. Matters, they say, look worse where journalists are allegedly beaten, their equipment taken or their footage deleted, because then police are not simply managing a crowd, they are deciding which evidence survives and what the public gets to see. Jahnavi Sen, managing editor of The Wire, told The Associated Press that the number of detentions was unusual, and suggested police seemed determined to stop images of their response from circulating.
The cost of controlling the record
Journalists were not the only people whose ability to communicate was restricted. Mobile internet was suspended and reportedly blocked in stadiums used as detention centres, which Amnesty and its partners said cut detainees off from lawyers and families. Shutdowns also stop people sharing news of arrests, finding missing relatives or documenting what security forces do.
Narendra Modi’s government, like any administration facing protests, has defended such actions on security grounds, and to be fair, a narrow, time-limited restriction may sometimes be justified to protect lives and public safety. The justification, though, has to be specific and the scope proportionate, since a broad shutdown around a demonstration reaches far beyond the people taking part.
Amnesty also reported that Instagram accounts belonging to the outlets Molitics and Journo Mirror were blocked in India during their coverage, under the country’s information technology rules. In this case, limits on accounts and access, they said, raise the question of whether authorities were restricting information well beyond the physical sites of the protests.
Modi’s mandate and its limits
Modi has been in power since 2014, building what many observers believe is a formidable political machine and a powerful national presence. His supporters point to his election wins and his development agenda as evidence of a durable mandate. Those achievements are part of the picture, so are the concerns critics raise about pressure on dissent, on independent media and on religious minorities, and the ongoing debate over the rolls has pulled several of them together around the institutions that decide how citizens take part.
All that said, it would be premature to conclude that the revision was designed to help the BJP. The Times’s reporting raises serious questions, though they still need corroboration from records, testimony and independent examination, and both the government and the Election Commission deny political manipulation. What a government cannot do is treat its majority as an answer to questions about accountability, and Modi’s majority, experts argue, is no defence against conduct that human rights groups have documented as a breach of international norms.
What remains to be established
The first task, and the hardest, is to find out what happened to the people whose names went missing, and whether they had a fair chance to object. According to experts, the 130 million figure needs breaking down by category, place and reason: how many were dead or duplicated, how many had moved, how many were eligible and wrongly removed. If Muslims, women, migrants or poorer citizens were hit disproportionately, the evidence should show how far, and whether that came from the design of the exercise, its implementation or something else. Unequal impact, experts believe, would warrant investigation even without proof of intent.
Rights groups have called for an inquiry into the treatment journalists have received during this recent episode. “Police should account for each detention, give the legal grounds, return equipment still held, and submit allegations of assault, intimidation and forced deletion to independent investigation with published findings, while the authorities should say what they have done to give effect to the Supreme Court’s directions.” Amnesty and its partners want those held solely for exercising their rights released, and allegations of abuse by security forces and of violence by non-state actors, investigated. All that puts the onus on the BJP authorities to show they take such complaints seriously rather than treating criticism as an attack on public order, but whether Modi’s administration will do so is another question. On the evidence of recent weeks documented by international media and rights groups, those in power in New Delhi appear to feel no obligation to answer the questions being raised about the treatment of protesters, about citizens barred from exercising their right to vote, and about journalists trying to document what is happening in India.