India’s ideal of inclusive, universal citizenship and equal belonging of people of every belief system was guaranteed in its secular democratic constitution. The constitution of India adopted the notion of universal equal citizenship for people of every faith, caste, ethnicity and language.
But today, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls threatens secular democracy in India more than anything that came before this.
The unnamed fear that hovered through the 2024 national elections was that if the BJP was returned with a decisive majority, it might even amend the constitution, erasing especially the rights of religious freedom and equal citizenship of religious minorities. But as the results poured in and it became clear that the ruling BJP had been denied a majority in parliament, many believed that the dangers to India’s secular democratic constitution had receded.
However, at the time I write this, midsummer 2026, it is evident that the electoral setback to the BJP in the 2024 national elections has not sobered the BJP or reined in its anti-constitutional aspirations. Instead, it has had exactly the opposite impact. The hustings in West Bengal in 2026 point to the imminent threats to both secularism and democracy, even more than in 2024.
The BJP’s War on the Electoral System
The reduced electoral mandate of 2024 seems to have motivated the BJP leadership to double down even further with all the amoral power that it could muster—which was considerable—to dismantle whatever was left in the integrity of the electoral system. Their aim is to game the system in a way that ends the possibility of the victory of the political opposition in a straight contest with the BJP.
It has accomplished this by defiantly and brazenly queering the election process, enabled by a collusive Election Commission and a quiescent judiciary. There is also cynical but surgical gerrymandering that divided Muslim majority constituencies in Assam in a manner that ensured that Muslim voters were denied their full capacity to influence electoral outcomes in several constituencies. The national government is trying, at the time I write, to muster the numbers in parliament to enable it to delimit constituencies across the country.
But this is not all. Because some seats still went to the political opposition, the BJP also decimated or emasculated what in the past were powerhouse regional parties, even those that had aligned with the BJP—the Janata Dal (United) led by Nitish Kumar in Bihar, the Biju Janata Dal led by Naveen Patnaik in Odisha, the Trinamul Congress led by Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and, as I write, the Shiv Sena faction led by Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra.
Speculation is rife about precisely what quantities of money exchanged hands to secure the massive exodus of elected representatives from all non-BJP parties into the BJP. The objective appears to be to manufacture—steal is a more pertinent word—a majority in the Rajya Sabha, which will enable the BJP-led government to pass any legislation that it chooses, even when it violates the letter and spirit of the constitution.
There is reason to fear that one constitutional amendment that this "majority" manufactured by bribery and intimidation will try to pass is to enable a national parliamentary delimitation process. This is likely to follow the Assam model of again dispersing Muslim populations between constituencies in ways that ensure that they are unable to influence electoral outcomes in most constituencies, and thereby render them politically insignificant.
Where does this leave the prospects of the survival of India’s secular democracy?
The Making of Second-Class Citizens
The project by the ruling BJP, led by Narendra Modi, to brazenly steal elections to remain in power at all costs is of course profoundly worrying. If the BJP juggernaut over India’s electoral system is not checked, the Indian people need to brace themselves for a long age of repressive autocracy.
But a long hot summer of autocracy by cynically and surgically destroying the integrity of the electoral process to ensure that the BJP remains in power is not the greatest danger that looms over the Indian people. The aim of the RSS-BJP is not simply to refuse to loosen their hold on power for the sake of holding state power regardless of the wishes of the voters. Its project is much more sinister.
This is to bring to full fruition the ideological blueprint for India that the RSS had drawn up 100 years ago. This is to remould a historically pluralist India into a homogenised Hindu nation, one in which Muslims and Christians are denied equal citizenship.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is the weapon of choice not simply for the mass elimination of voters who are unlikely to vote for the BJP. Reporter Neeraj Thakur writes, “Indian elections are increasingly being shaped by who appears on the list, not just by who shows up to vote.
West Bengal is now the clearest case study of that shift”. SIR is a project for the mass annihilation of the citizenship rights of India’s Muslims. For their disenfranchisement. For the manufacture of mass statelessness of India’s unwanted religious minorities.
For this reason, not just the spirit of the constitution, even its letter now seems under grave threat. This is not simply an anti-democratic project. That would be frightening enough. This is a fascist enterprise.
As Niraja Jayal, one of India’s most credible political scientists observed, “Apparently innocuous developments are occurring in different, ostensibly distinct, domains but they are all converging on a common purpose: to make Muslims into de jure second-class citizens. Their de facto second-class citizenship has already been achieved through the normalisation of everyday discrimination, through the emboldening of vigilante violence, and impunity for these. Now, the task is to render India’s largest minority as not just de facto, but also de jure, second-class citizens”.
A Project to Disenfranchise the Muslim Voter
The soul of India’s constitution can be traced to the time in 1947 when India broke into two countries amid horrific violence that took a million lives—Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh—and rendered some fifteen million people refugees, brutally uprooted from the land of their ancestors. At that moment the Indian people made a fateful, humanist, historic resolve. This was the resolve that India would be a country of equal belonging to people of every faith, caste, ethnicity and language.
It is this idea of universal citizenship that is under grave threat today
The first two terms of the Modi-led BJP government after 2014 were a decade in which both civic violence and sustained state persecution and denials had pushed India’s Muslim citizens—and especially in tribal regions of central India’s Christian converts—into the normalised everyday lived experience of second-class citizenship.
Hannah Ardent spoke influentially of citizenship being the right to have rights. India’s Muslims and tribal Christian converts were pushed deep in the first decade of Modi’s rule into a situation where they no longer had the right to have rights. People could call for their genocide, publicly lynch them to death or enforce their social or economic boycott, and the state could demolish their properties and shrines, but they would not be punished. Instead, they would rise as heroes of the Hindu nation.
What has happened since 2024 is not just that the lived experience of equal citizenship is being denied to India’s Muslim citizens and central Indian Christian converts. What they now are in mortal danger, particularly Indian Muslims, of legally being stripped of their citizenship rights.
For this, as mentioned, the ultimate weapon of choice of the ruling establishment is the Special Intensive Revision or SIR of India’s electoral rolls. Since it was introduced just months before the Bihar electorate was to go to the polls in 2025, the principal role of the Election Commission has metamorphosed from facilitating universal suffrage to eliminating en masse voters the regime is hostile to.
Well before the SIR was announced, there appears to have been a massive systematic attempt to manufacture consent for this drastic measure by creating fear among ordinary citizens about the impending threat of the Hindu majority in the country (to whom the country primarily belongs) being overrun by a sinister cross-border conspiracy to “infiltrate” the country from Bangladesh (and Myanmar) with Muslims who seek to penetrate and finally dominate the polity, economy and Hindu culture.
There was systematic fear-mongering of large “infiltration” into India from Bangladesh of “ghuspatiyas” or infiltrators. The language used by the Hindutva ideologues and BJP leaders is telling: undocumented Hindus and Sikhs are “refugees”, while Muslims (and Kuki-Zo people in Manipur) are infiltrators who pose an existential threat to the nation. This language has begun to enter law books and court-rooms.
The ground was laid by the most powerful men in the country to regard India’s Muslims as a potential threat in a massive sinister conspiracy against the nation. Prime Minister Modi chose his 2025 Independence Day speech to warn the nation of what he described as a premeditated conspiracy to change the demography of the nation through illegal infiltration.
No nation, he declared, can tolerate “intruders”. His closest lieutenant home minister Amit Shah further raised the temperature of this pitch. He described the rise in the Muslim population as “not natural”, being the result of illegal immigration from Bangladesh and Pakistan. He asked what motivated their migration to India when they were not being persecuted in their own countries. Echoing Modi, he claimed infiltrators were deliberately and dangerously altering India’s demography.
Addressing the Border Security Force on its raising day, he spoke of his “pledge” to “remove every single infiltrator from the country”. He described SIR, which by then had been initiated in Bihar, as necessary to “protect our country and democracy”.
Using a medical metaphor which became popularised in warfare against Pakistan, the Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath declared his commitment to undertake a “surgical strike” on “illegal infiltrators”. He announced the establishment of “high-security detention centres” which would make their escape impossible.
From early 2025, reports emerged of massive search operations to identify “illegal immigrants” mainly targeting Bengali speaking Muslim working class migrants in many parts of the country. Large numbers were casually thrown around. The Assam Chief Minister spoke of his resolve to expel 50,000 illegal immigrants in a year.
The Delhi Police claimed to have deported 1589 illegal immigrants in a year after June 2025. Rights groups complained that Bengali Muslims were detained and tortured by the Delhi Police. Thousands of Bengali Muslim migrants fled Delhi and Gurugram in the wake of the Pahalgam terrorist killings in March 2025. Entire settlements emptied out. In Ahmedabad 7000 tenements were demolished claiming that its Bengali Muslim residents were illegal immigrants.
Detention centres, now called “holding centres” , came up around the country. Some Bengali speaking migrants were even flown to the border with Bangladesh in BJP-ruled Tripura and pushed across the international border.
Shortly after his election, the BJP Chief Minister of West Bengal announced that he had instructed that detention centres be established in every district of the state. He claimed that 4800 illegal immigrants had been deported to Bangladesh in one month, and 836 more were in detention centres awaiting deportation. He mocked the policies of earlier governments who, he said, treated them as “honoured guests”, giving them food and medicine. Instead, his government would be ruthless.
Who is Entitled to be an Indian Citizen?
This constitutional principle of universal and inclusive citizenship was further affirmed with the Citizenship Act 1955 which laid down the principle of unconditional jus soli, citizenship based on birth on the soil of the country. This is more widely known as “birthright citizenship”, or the right of a person to become a citizen if born on the soil of the country, regardless of the legal status of the person’s parents.
America, under Trump, is attempting to end birthright citizenship, but until the time of writing, the courts have stood in the way of Trump. However, India in recent decades has seen the dilution and effective abandonment of the principle of unconditional jus soli, first influenced by the Assam movement and then under the BJP governments of Vajpayee and Modi.
The Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS answer the question of who should be eligible to be a citizen of India in ways that are in direct opposition to the answer of India’s freedom struggle and its constitution. The Hindutva notion of nationhood is one in which India is the natural home to Hindus, and to people of other faiths that originated on Indian soil—including Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism.
The first amendment to India’s citizenship law was in 1985. It gave effect to an agreement under the Assam Accord. For the first time, the principle of jus soli became conditional. Persons born in India after July 1, 1987 could become a citizen only if at least one of their parents was an Indian.
An even more consequential amendment was brought in 2003 when Valpayee was Prime Minister. Even the conditional jus soli of 1985 was abandoned. Now if even one parent was an “illegal migrant” at the time of their birth, the person was ineligible for Indian citizenship. In effect, this provision debarred even descendants of persons of Muslim identity from neighbouring countries from accessing Indian citizenship. The amendment also introduced the National Population Register and the National Register of Indian Citizens.
This 2003 amendment was extremely consequential in effectively ending India’s religion-neutral universal and inclusive citizenship regime. As Jayal points out, the Rules under the act ensured that “the stigma of the term ‘illegal migrant’ would no longer attach to Hindu migrants who had come in from Pakistan, into the border states of western India, Gujarat, and Rajasthan”.
The amendment to the Act smuggled in a religious category covertly by the term “illegal migrant” because, as Jayal writes, “the term illegal migrant was code for Bangladeshi—ergo Muslim—migrant”. But “the amendment to the Rules did so explicitly by exempting Hindus from this category.”
The 2019 amendment completed this business of dismantling India’s religion-neutral and inclusive citizenship regime by explicitly introducing a religious filter in eligibility for citizenship, by providing for a fast track citizenship to undocumented “migrants” other than Muslims.
The country saw the largest peaceful uprising against the law since the struggle for freedom, in which the constitution and the tri-coloured national flag became icons of the resistance. However, the covid pandemic wrought an abrupt end to the people’s struggle that had brought Hindus, Sikhs and Christians to the streets in solidarity with their Muslim compatriots.
The National Indian Register of Citizens combined with the 2019 citizenship amendment which would have safeguarded all undocumented persons except Muslims that was feared, was shelved in the years since the 2019-20 popular uprising. But the project to disenfranchise Muslims and deprive them of their citizenship rights seems to have been introduced through the backdoor of the SIR stewarded by an unapologetically partisan Election Commission and enabled by a compliant Supreme Court.
The Weapon of Choice: SIR
Ashok Lavasa, former Election Commissioner observes that in Bihar, the electoral rolls were updated through the normal legal process and published in January 2025. There is no explanation why “suddenly, less than six months down the line, there is a realisation that something is horribly wrong with the electoral roll, and that we must conduct this so-called Special Intensive Revision”.
It is unsurprising that when the Chief Election Commissioner announced his decision to undertake an SIR in Bihar, he cited the urgent need to identify and eliminate the names of “foreign illegal immigrants” from the electoral rolls. The ground had already been laid by building a popular “common sense” of the threats of allegedly massive illegal immigration. He did not explain why these illegal immigrants had escaped earlier voter revisions including one as recent as in January 2025. Also why Bihar is in danger of illegal immigration when it does not even have an international border.
It is also unsurprising that the CEC Gyanesh Kumar has refused to answer questions about the numbers of "foreign illegal immigrants’ that the SIR detected, not just in Bihar but also in the subsequent SIR exercises in other states.
Noted transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj speaks of how, consistent with its stonewalling of any attempts by the opposition parties or citizens for transparency in the functioning of the Election Commission, it answered RTI questions about the reasons why it undertook this exercise saying that it had no documents listing out the reasons why it had undertaken this mammoth exercise, involving a billion voters, which could disenfranchise millions of people.
The Principal Secretary in writing averred that the decision to hold the SIR had not been taken in the Election Commission. “That begs the question: where was this decision taken?” Bhardwaj asks. “Was it taken in the BJP headquarters? Was it taken in the Ministry of Home Affairs? Where was this decision to hold the SIR taken?” We still have no idea, even after 65 million people have been struck off the electoral rolls when much of the country is still to be covered by the SIR.
In West Bengal, without explaining why, the Election Commission introduced a secret algorithm to identify “logical discrepancies” in the electoral lists. In a country in which until recently, few births were registered, people mostly estimated their date of birth, and Arabic names and names in Indian languages can be spelt in varying ways, around 2.7 million voters were designated doubtful just weeks before the elections were due.
The Supreme Court directed the establishing of tribunals with judicial officers to examine the claims of these “doubtful” voters. These considered a few thousand of the claims, and the overwhelming majority of these restored the names to the electoral lists. But according to some estimates, it could take these tribunal over 20 years to adjudicate their claims. Until then, India’s highest court is not exercised by the potential exclusion of millions of voters from their constitutional right to vote.
How did "logical discrepancy" deletions work in practice? “Variations in spelling — Rai versus Ray, Mohammad versus Muhammad — became grounds for exclusion. Cases where one parent was linked to more than six voters, or where the age gap between voter and grandparent was less than 40 years, were also flagged.
In a state of linguistic plurality, where surnames have long been anglicised in inconsistent ways and where many Bengali Muslims do not use fixed surnames, these criteria produced disproportionate effects”. The Kolkata-based Sabar Institute found that the system flagged Muslim names disproportionately for adjudication.
The Inversion of Burden of Proof
For seventy-five years, the state presumed you were a citizen, and had to prove otherwise. Except in Assam.
“Now, the burden has been flipped onto you,” India’s trusted retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur said in a gathering in Delhi.
Former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa said that the Commission had, in his experience, never used the word “citizenship” while conducting a revision. The law does allow a non-citizen to be excluded, he acknowledged, "but for that, somebody has to say that so-and-so is a non-citizen — and not only create suspicion, but produce evidence." That, he stressed, was always "an exception, not the rule."
Lavasa spoke of a scene from an old Hindi film, in which a father demanding proof of a suitor's love is asked in return what proof he has that he is the girl's father. In a country now asking millions to prove what was never in question, as reporter Varghese George observes, the joke has stopped being funny.
Ashok Lavasa speaks of what the Israeli historian Ornit Shani described as the "democratic imagination" that made India’s first electoral rolls—and those that followed until 2025—inclusive, despite the absence of documents. Shani gives the example of people living as so-called encroachers in Bombay, on common municipal land, who had no proof of anything, and yet were enrolled as electors.
There was a presumption of citizenship. A voter only needed to declare "I am a citizen of India" and give his date of birth and proof of residence ( so as to determine the electoral roll of that particular constituency) "There was always a presumption of citizenship attached to whoever was around. And the identification of a non-citizen was an exception." It is this presumption that has been abandoned, placing all those who the state is hostile to in danger of disenfranchisement and even more frighteningly of statelessness.
Before the SIR, electoral roll revision was a routine democratic exercise. It added new voters, removed the deceased based on records, and corrected errors. It was, as Anand Teltumbde observes, “incremental, cautious, and overwhelmingly additive. Democracies assume that electorates grow”. The SIR “departs radically from this logic. It is subtractive, exceptional, and expansive. Most critically, it reverses the constitutional burden of proof. Instead of the state establishing grounds for deletion, citizens are required to prove their continued eligibility”.
Madan Lokur elaborates that so far, if my name was in the electoral rolls, the presumption was that I am a citizen of India. This was a rebuttable presumption, but if someone—in this case the Election Commission or the state—claimed that I am not a citizen it was for the Commission or the state to prove that I am an alien. It was not I who must prove that I am a citizen. It is this burden of proof that the SIR turned on its head.
This inversion of the burden of proof—that every person is presumed to be not a citizen but an alien until (s)he proves citizenship to the satisfaction of the state and now the Election Commission—began with the Assam National Register of Citizenship (NRC). It is significant that it was India’s Supreme Court that first ordered this reversal of the responsibility to prove who is a citizen or alien for the Assam NRC in its judgment in the Sonowal vs Union of India (2005) case.
Very controversially, it relied on the unverified discourse of hordes of illegal immigrants and described this as “external aggression”. The court held that if the state was required to prove that a person is an alien, it would be impossible to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants, and the court therefore inverted the burden of proof. It is this dubious principle that the Election Commission has now extended to the entire country through the instrument of the SIR.
This reversal in the burden of proof, Jayal explains, ironically mimics a colonial law—the Foreigners’ Act 1946, which places the burden of proof on the individual charged with being a foreigner.
Also, like the Foreigners Act which empowered any person who believes a foreigner is illegally in India to inform the nearest police station, the SIR allows anyone from the same assembly constituency to submit any number of objections. This provision, she observes, can and has encouraged vigilantism—from Madhya Pradesh to Bihar, and the targets of this viligantism have been overwhelmingly Muslim voters.
This inversion, Teltumbde cautions, is not “procedural trivia”; it is “constitutional sabotage”. Universal adult franchise rests on a presumption of inclusion. “The state must prove death, duplication, or loss of citizenship. The SIR replaces this presumption with suspicion. Voting ceases to be a right flowing from citizenship and becomes an administrative privilege, contingent on documentation, deadlines, and bureaucratic discretion. A right that must be periodically re-earned is no longer a right”.
The Consequences of Exclusion from Electoral Rolls
The human stories behind the numbers of persons disputed or deleted from the electoral rolls through the SIR (65 million at the time of writing) need much closer study and documentation. According to a report by Probe, “Wing Commander Md Shamim Akhtar (Retd), a decorated Indian Air Force veteran from Kolkata's Entally constituency who had once held a diplomatic passport, found his name placed under adjudication and described a process that, in his words, questioned his citizenship.
Mohammad Daud Ali, a Kargil war veteran injured in combat, similarly feared losing his franchise. A former Calcutta High Court judge and several retired bureaucrats also reportedly featured on the lists. Masooda Bibi, a 65-year-old garment worker in Metiabruz whose family had lived in the same home for five generations, was deleted. So were Booth Level Officers conducting the SIR itself — including Mohammad Shafiul Alam from Bashirhat found their names taken off”.
As Jayal observes, the cumulative effect of these amendments to India’s citizenship law has been “to stigmatise and exclude Muslim citizens, in a way that abandons the constitutional vision of universal equal citizenship in favour of the RSS ideal of a hierarchy of citizenship in the Hindu Rashtra”. In this way, she says, “the history of citizenship law shows a gradual move from unconditional jus soli to conditional jus soli to jus sanguinis—an accretion over time. The question of citizenship is now yoked to the service of a majoritarian agenda, approximating Sarvarkar’s dream”.
A retired civil servant RS Sharma powerfully evokes the predicament of the working class Indian voter who is asked to prove her citizenship with documents that either the state never provided her or official documents that the state selectively chooses to distrust.
“Consider a 60-year-old farm labourer in a village in eastern Uttar Pradesh, born at home in the 1960s, who has voted in every election of his life,” he urges us. During the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, an official asks him to prove his date of birth, his residence and his citizenship. He has no birth certificate, because no one registered his birth. His ration card, he is told, is not proof of residence.
His Aadhaar — posted years ago to his very door — proves neither his age, address, nor his citizenship. He never held a passport and never finished school. He stands before the state with empty hands, and the burden is on him to prove that he is not a foreigner”.
His predicament, Sharma tells us, is the predictable result of failures of the state, and not of the citizen. For decades the state barely implemented The Registration of Births and Deaths Act which mandated, since 1969, that every birth be registered within 21 days. Among children under five, only 41 percent of births were registered as recently as 2005-06. Before this, the majority of Indians were born at home, and institutional deliveries were under 39 percent.
Today, registrations have risen to 98 percent, but as Sharma reminds us, the births now registered describe today’s newborns; it says nothing about the adults already on the rolls. Today, only one voter in eight has a birth certificate issued at the time of birth; some 85 crore do not. He rightly observes, “A test that the overwhelming majority of citizens cannot pass is not a test of eligibility. It is a machine for exclusion”.
He speaks of his own experience as UIDAI’s founding director general. He found that a great many residents simply did not know their date of birth. “People would fix their age by an event (such as) the year the great drought happened. It is why so many Indians carry January 1 as their birthday: the date the system assigns when only a year is known. To demand a precise, documented date of birth from such people is not rigour; it is exclusion”.
Lokur unpacks the consequences of the role of the Election Commission in doubting and excluding people from their citizenship rights. He says that some fundamental rights - Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty, and Article 14, the right to equality, are granted to everybody, whether you are a citizen or not.
But other fundamental rights are granted only to citizens. Important among these is Article 19—the rights to freedom of speech and expression, of peaceful assembly, association, movement, residence and profession. Now suddenly, if a person does not satisfy the requirements of the Election Commission, is not able to vote, “and therefore, under Article 326, is perhaps deemed not a citizen of India — then that person is not entitled to any of the fundamental rights under Article 19.
“Can you imagine that?” the retired judge asks. “Somebody takes away your fundamental right to freedom of speech. You go to the court and say, I am a citizen of India, and my fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression has been taken away.
And the judge asks you: what proof do you have that you are a citizen of India? What is your answer? You don't have a single document to show that you are a citizen of India. … So, in effect, all these persons who have not been allowed to vote, and are therefore held not to be citizens of India, and are perhaps stateless persons, have been deprived of a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed under Article 19.
So you have these 27 lakh, or 22 lakh, or 6.5 crore persons — whatever the figure — roaming around the country without the fundamental right to freedom of speech, to movement, to expression, to carrying on any business or occupation, because they are not citizens”.
Jayal underlines that the SIR has implications for both the civil and political rights of Indian citizens—in the form of mass disenfranchisement – as also for their social and economic rights. Already state governments are withholding welfare benefits like food rations to persons who have been unable to prove their eligibility to vote to the satisfaction of the Election Commission. Welfare provisioning is now contingent on your name being on the electoral rolls—neither the Supreme Court nor the Calcutta High Court have seen fit to correct this.
Teltumbde explains why those who are excluded are not accidental. The requirements of SIR—proof of residence, timely responses, documentary verification, procedural navigation—privilege the stable and propertied while excluding the mobile and poor. The resulting electorate increasingly resembles the socially secure rather than the citizenry as it exists.
“Those most vulnerable to deletion from electoral rolls are entirely predictable: migrant workers with shifting addresses; the urban and rural poor living in informal housing; Dalits and Adivasis whose historical exclusion translates into thin documentary records; Muslims whose citizenship has been rendered perpetually suspect through NRC–CAA discourse; informal-sector workers whose labour leaves no bureaucratic trace; and citizens whose precarious lives do not generate the paperwork modern governance demands”.
These are “precisely the populations Indian democracy has struggled to include—and that are electorally inconvenient to ruling powers”. Why? “They vote disproportionately against incumbents, resist nationalist mobilisations, and benefit least from welfare regimes designed to discipline rather than empower. That they are also the first to disappear from electoral rolls is not coincidence but pattern”.
In this way, not all residents of India are equally vulnerable to the stripping of their citizenship rights through the SIR. As Jayal observes, “who gets the memo and who doesn’t is for the most part a function of one’s identity— religion, caste, class, gender, tribe, and so on. Occasionally, there is a black swan event—such as the story of the journalist R. Rajagopal—but, for the most part, it is precision targeting (my italics)”. The target of BJP governments is overwhelmingly the community that the RSS—the mothership of the BJP—believes should be ineligible for citizenship to the Hindu Indian nation, India’s Muslims.
A Gathering Darkness
We have many examples from the world of how quickly darkness can gather. We only need to look at Nazi Germany, at Bosnia, at Rwanda, at Pakistan, to recognise that the mass targeting with hate and violence of a minority is enabled by a partisan state, by ideologically committed militias and civilian cadres, and the silent indifference of a many.
We need to look at the United States of America, Israel, and many countries of Europe to witness how democratic institutions can crumble giving way to authoritarian rulers who target and encourage hate against vulnerable minorities and immigrants.
I recall again the hopes that rose initially because the people of India had declined to give Narendra Modi one more decisive mandate to rule India for another five years in 2024. It was believed that a great constitutional coup of dismantling secular democracy had been averted. If the BJP had been given a full majority in parliament, the freedoms of both conscience and faith could have been crushed. India would have become a dangerous place to be either a minority or a dissenter. India’s secular democracy would have given way to an authoritarian fascistic state.
Two years later, the sombre political reality of India is unmistakable. The dangers to constitutional secularism and the equal citizenship rights of minorities have not receded. They have become even more immediate, more menacing. The SIR threatens secular democracy in India more than anything that came before this.
The election results of 2024 have not stilled the storms of majoritarian hate and the persecution of religious minorities. The reduced mandate for the BJP has not dented the power of an authoritarian state powered by an ideology of anti-minority hate. The militia and cadres of the Hindu Right remain powerful and motivated.
But most of all, the state has accomplished its capture of all democratic institutions. The Modi.3 term is actually marked by an even more decisive storming in the direction of authoritarian majoritarianism, aimed at stripping India’s Muslims and Christians of their rights of equal citizenship.
Leading public intellectual Anand Teltumbde is scathing in his assessment of where Indian democracy stands—or totters—after the SIR. Not even in wars, famines and the pandemic has the India republic seen such a drastic decline in registered voters as after a year of the SIR. “The scale of deletion alone rules out benign explanations”, Teltumbde observes.
“Yet what has followed is not democratic disclosure but bureaucratic silence; not demographic justification but procedural alibis”. This deletion of 65 million voters, “is not statistical correction. It is a constitutional crisis. When voters become editable, citizenship provisional, and rights revocable by procedure, democracy survives only as shell—its language intact, its substance gone”.
A decline of this magnitude is, Teltumbde explains, a statistical impossibility. This decline can be explained by only three phenomena: mass death, mass emigration, or mass disenfranchisement. The maximalist estimates of deaths during covid is five million people, and not all of these were voters. This does not explain 65 million voters being eliminated. There has been no greater mass emigration than during India’s cataclysmic Partition, and even then around 15 million people left their countries of birth to move to the other.
The inescapable explanation, then, is mass targeted disenfranchisement. “This is political engineering of the electorate, not demographic correction”.
“The question before the republic,” he avers, “is no longer administrative but existential: if the state can erase 65 million citizens from electoral rolls without census data, without parliamentary debate, without transparent criteria, and without meaningful due process, does universal adult franchise exist as a right—or merely as constitutional ornament?”
Political scientist Niraja Jayal explains that the “foundational conception of universal equal citizenship in our constitution and in the law on citizenship was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship. That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced by a presumption of universal alienage”.
At the heart of the crisis of citizenship and the potential to manufacture mass statelessness on a scale never seen in the democratic world is competing ideas about who is entitled to be a citizen of India? The exclusionary idea of citizenship seems to be triumphing over constitutional universality.
What makes the SIR even more dangerous for democracy, Teltumbde explains, is that it is being conducted while the state did not allow the census to be conducted for five years from 2021, when it was due. “The irony is brutal. A state that demands documents to prove citizenship refuses to document its own population. Papers are demanded selectively —weaponised against the vulnerable, suspended when they might constrain power. Documentation here serves control, not truth”. A SIR conducted without census data is not efficiency, he explains; “it is sovereign power unmoored from empirical accountability. It is the assertion of authority to redraw the political community without submitting that authority to demographic reality”. The state is no longer “administering democracy. It is editing it”.
This, Teltumbde warns us, is how democracies decay— “not through dramatic constitutional ruptures but through procedural normalisation. When voting becomes contingent on bureaucratic approval, when millions can be removed through administrative exercises, democracy survives only as ritual”.
The century-old Hindutva project of dismantling India’s secular democracy and diminishing the right of Muslims and Christians to belong as equal citizens with equal rights in this teeming, ancient country is critically threatened as never before in the journey of the Indian republic. A day must come—and it must come soon—when the silent majority breaks their silence and stands in resolute solidarity with its oppressed compatriots of persecuted and excluded religions and castes. The ideological project of hate thrives in hearts and minds. It is only in hearts and minds that it can be defeated.
This is the most important battle of our age.
I am grateful to Syed Rubeel Haider Zaidi for his research support.
(The author is a social activist, writer, and researcher who started the Karwan-e-Mohabbat campaign in solidarity with the victims of communal or religiously motivated violence. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)