The Indian authorities' removal of over 130 million names from the country's electoral rolls is arbitrary and deeply flawed, Human Rights Watch said today.
In October 2026, tens of thousands of people across India began demonstrating against the Election Commission of India's Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The process purportedly removed dead, duplicate, or ineligible voters, but has been arbitrary and opaque and has disproportionately excluded women, people living in poverty, religious minorities, especially Muslims, and people from other marginalized communities. In October, the Election Commission submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court defending its functioning and rejecting all allegations of irregularities.
"Indian authorities first stripped millions of citizens of their right to vote and are now beating and jailing them for peacefully protesting these rights violations," said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. "The authorities should immediately scrap the voter roll revision process that has denied India's most marginalized people their right to vote and other government services."
The protesters have demanded that the process should be scrapped and that the country's top election official should resign. The authorities responded with the heavy deployment of security personnel, who committed widespread abuses against protesters and journalists covering the protests.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government should immediately end the crackdown on peaceful protests, appropriately prosecute those responsible for abuses, restore every citizen's right to participate in elections, and establish an independent investigation into allegations of politically motivated interference.
Since August, Human Rights Watch has interviewed 70 people in Delhi and the states of West Bengal, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, including 40 people whose families were affected by the SIR process, as well as former election commissioners, lawyers, civil society activists, and a current electoral official.
Under India's Constitution, the Election Commission of India is authorized to revise and update voter rolls, provided that it records its reasons in writing. Ashok Lavasa, a former election commissioner, said that while the commission had routinely updated electoral rolls, it had never before effectively scrapped the voter rolls for the entire country and started the process anew. "The onus of maintaining a clean, updated electoral roll was always on the election commission," Lavasa said. "It was never on the elector, where he or she had to apply, and if they didn't apply, their constitutional right would be excluded."
The SIR process began in June 2025 in states with upcoming local elections, requiring voters to show documents proving their eligibility to vote. The process placed a special burden on many in India, especially women and those from socially and economically marginalized communities, who find it difficult to obtain government documents.
In addition, the commission adopted arbitrary criteria such as "logical discrepancies" to delete voters who possessed the required documents, modified its rules and forms mid-process without transparency, and used an opaque software system that by its own admission was malfunctioning.
The media reported in several states that people had submitted applications seeking to have Muslims deleted from voter lists in bulk. India's election law allows third parties to object to someone's inclusion in voter rolls, but it is generally meant for reasons such as death or duplicate entry. Opposition parties and civil society activists allege that the commission has manipulated electoral rolls to benefit the ruling BJP.
The Election Commission has not defined the term "logical discrepancies" in any written communication, but Human Rights Watch found that people were arbitrarily excluded for mismatched names, spelling errors, having six or more siblings, or even siblings born less than nine months apart, which would flag most twins.
A 26-year-old Muslim tailor with three brothers and four sisters in the South 24 Parganas district in West Bengal said his name was flagged under the "logical discrepancy" list because he had more than five siblings. Five of his siblings were flagged, while three made it into the rolls. "Everyone had documents but despite that our names were deleted," he said, noting that his family has been on the voter rolls for generations.
Even though millions of names had been eliminated from the voter rolls, the Supreme Court in May 2026 ruled that the data did not indicate "systemic disenfranchisement." And while the court also said that the SIR process did not determine citizenship, BJP state governments in West Bengal and Bihar announced that people whose names were deleted from voter rolls would no longer be eligible for certain government social security programs, including food subsidies.
Human Rights Watch found that the authorities have used SIR data to deny government services including passport renewals, social security benefits such as a West Bengal cash assistance program for women, scholarships, and residency certificates needed for college admission.
India is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which guarantees every citizen the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs, to vote and be elected at genuine periodic elections, and to have access to public services without discrimination or unreasonable restrictions. The United Nations Human Rights Committee, which provides authoritative guidance on the covenant, has stated in its General Comment No. 25 that state authorities are obligated to take effective measures to facilitate and not impose obstacles to voter registration, and they must require that any conditions imposed for exercising the right to vote must be objective, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory.
India's Special Intensive Revision process has been neither reasonable nor proportionate, has imposed unnecessary procedural burdens on millions of people, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement, in violation of India's international legal obligations, Human Rights Watch said.
"The disproportionate removal of Muslims and other groups of voters from the rolls raises serious questions about the fairness of future Indian elections, crucial to holding governments accountable," Pearson said. "The government should ensure that all those wrongfully removed from voter rolls promptly regain their voting rights and no one loses access to social security and other programs."
An Arbitrary Process
India had 960 million registered voters ahead of 2024 general elections. The last intensive revision of voter rolls, between 2002 and 2006, involved enumerators-field workers who collect information about households-conducting door-to-door verification using preliminary lists generated from the then-existing rolls, with strict supervision and monitoring requirements.
"It was the inclusive approach and friendly procedure that the Election Commission of India historically followed which enabled the inclusion of more than 98 percent of the eligible adult population in the electoral roll, one of the highest for any functioning electoral democracy," said Lavasa, the former election commissioner.
For the 2025-2026 revision, the Election Commission has instead applied an evolving set of rules across what it describes as three phases of the SIR. In the first phase, in Bihar just months before legislative elections in November 2025, voters had to fill out enumeration forms and provide 1 of 11 documents from an approved list to prove their eligibility. In August 2025, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to add a national biometric identity document, the Aadhaar card, to that list. Nearly 4.7 million names were deleted from the state's voter rolls.
In a second phase, in 10 states and 2 union territories, the Election Commission introduced a step called "mapping" in which voters had to trace themselves or a parent to the electoral rolls prepared during the 2002-2006 intensive revision. The poll body also began deleting names from the rolls for what it called "logical discrepancies," which had no clear definition or legal basis. Voters flagged for a logical discrepancy receive notices and are required to appear for hearings with electoral registration officers mandated to prepare and publish the electoral rolls.
"We never knew anything about logical discrepancies during our training," said a primary school teacher in West Bengal serving as a booth-level officer, who verifies and updates the electoral roll for a specific polling booth. "The process was haphazard and I only received three days of training from election officials before the SIR began," he said. "And once the exercise began, the rules kept changing."
As the process went on, the rules were often arbitrarily altered. In West Bengal, for instance, the number of voters under suspicion fell from 16.7 million to about 9.5 million within weeks after a public outcry. Muslims, who historically do not vote for the BJP because it promotes Hindu majoritarianism, were disproportionately targeted. In one constituency, Patharpratima in South 24 Parganas, over 92 percent of those deleted were Muslims, though Muslims constitute only 9 percent of the population. Shortly afterward, in the April 2025 election, the BJP won control of the state for the first time, while the Supreme Court effectively said it was acceptable for those excluded not to be able to vote that time so long as they would be added back to the rolls.
About 93 percent of the voters in West Bengal whose appeals were decided were eventually restored to the rolls, showing that 9 out of every 10 voters removed from the voter list were wrongfully removed. The Calcutta High Court said, however, that it would take at least 21 years to resolve over 3.4 million appeals to the deletions still pending in the appellate tribunals.
In the third and final phase, ongoing in 16 states and 3 union territories, the electoral body modified Form 6 used to enroll new voters, requiring additional information from applicants about whether their parents or grandparents were part of the previous intensive revision. Two election commissioners reportedly objected to these changes, but the electoral body claimed it had Supreme Court permission to add the requirement. The chief justice of India said the court had not approved the change.
The Election Commission has also directed states to use Form 6 to reenroll voters who had been deleted from lists, even though these were not new voters but rather those who had voted in previous elections. This required voters to falsely declare that they were applying for the first time, a criminal offense that carries a jail term of up to a year.
Misuse of Objection Forms for Bulk Deletions
Form 7 allows third parties to object to anyone's inclusion on the electoral rolls. Media reports show that people in several states filed this form in bulk to systematically object to eligible Muslim voters. When an objection is filed, electoral registration officers may accept an objection if they are satisfied or conduct a hearing by giving notice to the relevant parties. Individual electors were only allowed to file six such forms online, but there was no limit on the number of paper forms they could submit, allowing bulk filing. Opposition leaders and civil society groups accused BJP booth-level agents of misusing the form to file objections in bulk. Until 2023, these agents could file up to 10 forms a day, but they were allowed to file up to 50 forms per day once the SIR was underway in October 2025.
In Karnataka, Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar demanded a police inquiry into bulk deletions, and in some districts police cases were filed against BJP workers. In two assembly constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, about 90 percent of the deletion forms were filed against Muslim voters. Five men reportedly linked to the BJP filed 6,500 deletion applications against Muslim voters in Uttarakhand. In May 2026, the Gujarat High Court issued a notice to the state and its election authorities over allegations of targeted deletions. In October, the Election Commission applied stricter limits, allowing each elector to file only 10 forms throughout the claims and objections period.
Exclusions Driven by Opaque Software
The SIR process uses software to which no one outside the Election Commission has access; the technology has long been opaque and there are reasons to question its reliability. The Election Commission scanned and digitized the paper electoral rolls of 2002 to 2006 and printed the rolls in several Indian language scripts that were transliterated into English by the software, without any publicly established standards to maintain accuracy, the New Delhi-based Internet Freedom Foundation found. This seemingly flawed database provided the baseline for voter eligibility during the first step of the 2025 process, when every voter form was keyed into the system and then traced back to previous rolls. Technologies, including purpose-built or proprietary software designed and deployed for public use, should be subject to public scrutiny, Human Rights Watch said.
In December 2025, the office of West Bengal's chief electoral officer said that the software was malfunctioning because the 2002 data "had not been digitized accurately." And as Human Rights Watch and others have found, the software has disproportionately flagged names from Adivasi, or indigenous, and Muslim communities for "logical discrepancies," in part because the spelling of names in such communities is more fluid: for example, Md, Mohammed, Mohd, or Mohammad are variants of the same name; Sk, Shaikh, Sheikh, or Sheik are also equivalents.
Md Shamim Akhtar, a former wing commander in the Indian air force, found his name was deleted from electoral rolls in West Bengal in March 2026. He said that he did not receive any notice or hearing even though he had traced his name to the 2002 voter lists. He speculated it was most likely because one of his documents had a period after Md while the other did not, and the software may have flagged that as a discrepancy. His appeal has been pending in the appellate tribunal since April 2026, even though his parents and siblings are included in the final voter rolls. "This is a subversion of democracy," he said. "If this can happen to me, then what about those who do not have a voice?"
Facing Growing Scrutiny
In September 2026, the Indian Express published a series of investigations documenting that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had made decisions regarding the SIR unilaterally, often over the objections of the other two commissioners. This included decisions to delete names, to add new voters, and to increasingly centralize the electoral roll database. This limited the authority of officers responsible for verifying and finalizing the voter lists, a departure from the decentralized electoral system that the commission has always presented as one of its strongest safeguards. The Election Commission responded by saying differences of views among staff are part of the normal operations of any institution. Petitions challenging the revision process and seeking Kumar's removal are before the Supreme Court.
Former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi said the SIR was "illegal" and called for those responsible in the Election Commission to be "criminally prosecuted." In October, a current Supreme Court judge called the exercise "intrinsically arbitrary," while a former Supreme Court judge spoke of Election Commission's "malfunction." A judge in the Bombay High Court questioned the purpose of the SIR if citizens were being removed from the voter rolls.
Former Indian diplomats and government officials demanded that the exercise be scrapped, saying that it undermined India's commitment to universal adult suffrage and made a mockery of its democracy. In May, three UN human rights experts warned that the SIR may amount to the instrumentalization of state administrative machinery "for the purpose of political targeting of a religious minority."
Disproportionate Harm to Women, Marginalized Communities
The Election Commission's stated purpose for the SIR was to ensure that "no eligible citizen is left out" and "no ineligible person is included." Yet existing evidence indicates that large numbers of citizens, disproportionately those from the most marginalized communities, have been wrongly excluded.
An analysis of the SIR data by the Hindu found that significantly more women than men have been deleted across the country. Nearly 60 percent of those deleted in Bihar were women. In West Bengal, women constituted over 60 percent of those deleted from the voter rolls and as many as 6 million were unable to vote in the state's legislative elections. Women made up more than half of the deleted voters in 88 percent of the constituencies in the state and are heavily concentrated especially in areas populated by Muslims, the Scheduled Caste Matua community, and Scheduled Tribes.
Issues such as a change in one's last name, spelling, address, or the ability to map to parents or grandparents have disproportionately affected single women, widows, and those living in poverty. Being marked as "permanently shifted" because of relocation to their husband's homes after marriage is one of the main reasons women voters have been disproportionately excluded.
In the third and final phase of the SIR, the Election Commission stopped disclosing the gender of the voters flagged as suspicious. Several women's groups wrote to the poll body raising concerns over the large-scale exclusion of women and gender minorities from the exercise.
Members of religious minorities, especially Muslims, are particularly likely to be removed from rolls due to third-party objections and being flagged by electoral software for "logical discrepancies." Documentation by the Kolkata-based Sabar Institute found significant disparities. For instance, Muslims make up 20 percent of the Bhabanipur constituency, while nearly 52 percent of names on the logical discrepancy list are Muslim.
A 34-year-old Muslim man in West Bengal said that although his father was on the rolls and he met the mapping requirement, his name was placed "under adjudication" pending verification by judicial officers because he comes from a family with eight siblings, leading the software to flag his registration as containing "logical discrepancies." However, several of his siblings were included in the lists. During his hearing on February 5, he submitted his Aadhaar card, PAN card issued by the income tax authorities, and voter card, yet his name was deleted three days later. He filed an online appeal on February 12, which remains pending.
The process also does not account for people who are estranged from their families. This leaves lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people who are cut off by relatives due to their sexual orientation or gender identity at particular risk of exclusion. Those with severed family relations may not be traced to a relative or have access to documents, such as birth certificates and school records, which families often hold. Several transgender people whose families have abandoned them could not be traced to a relative on the last intensive revision rolls, trans rights activists said.
Transgender people who have updated their identity documents face a heightened risk of exclusion. A 2014 Supreme Court ruling recognized transgender people's right to legal gender recognition, and some transgender people have since updated their records. As a result, older records may carry one name and gender, and newer ones another. The lack of any procedure to reconcile such document mismatches makes it difficult to prove identity, and government-issued transgender identity certificates are not among the documents accepted by election authorities.
A 27-year-old Hindu transgender man in West Bengal found his name removed from the rolls after his parents, who were included, refused to give him their voter card details for mapping and deliberately misinformed the booth-level officer of his whereabouts. The officer refused to include his name without his parents' signature because his other documents reflected his previous name and sex assigned at birth. "I tried contacting my parents after I left home to explain myself to them," he said. "But they wanted me to leave my partner and marry a man."
Some people whose homes were arbitrarily demolished after authorities claimed the homes were illegal have also been removed from the electoral rolls. In Delhi, about 87 percent of voters were deleted in nine polling stations where homes were demolished, with booth-level officers classifying the displaced voters as "absent/untraceable." Those displaced were unclear on what address to include on their voter forms. In October, the Delhi Election Commission said it would organize "special camps" for voters whose homes were razed, enabling them to be enrolled. However, these were not uniformly organized across the country.
The cost of challenging a deletion, including lost earnings, can make it harder for people with limited incomes, including workers paid by the day living in poverty, to secure reinstatement on the electoral rolls, compounding the barriers they face. In contrast, the authorities have at times bypassed their own official mechanisms to simplify reinstatement of prominent politicians, government officials, and actors. For instance, a notice issued to the Delhi chief minister for a logical discrepancy was resolved within hours without an official hearing.
Denial of Access to Government Services, Social Security, and Education
In July, the Supreme Court said that SIR data could not be used by the authorities for other purposes. However, information about deleted voters is being used to halt passport renewals and deny access to social security programs, residency certificates for students, and scholarships to children in public schools.
In Bihar, the BJP state government removed over 3 percent of names from the public distribution system for subsidized food rations after their names were deleted from the electoral rolls. In May and June, West Bengal authorities published notices saying deleted voters who had not filed appeals in the tribunal would not be eligible for subsidized food grains or direct cash transfers for women under the state's Annapurna Yojana program, but Human Rights Watch found that even those who had filed appeals were being denied access.
A 38-year-old woman in South 24 Parganas district said she had registered for the Annapurna Yojana program in June, had received assistance in July, but then it abruptly stopped. Her name had been deleted from the voter roll in March even though her three siblings were included. She said she appealed the decision, but the state stopped her cash transfers anyway. "I valued that money a lot," she said. "I used to pay my daughter's school fees with it."
Another woman, 25, from the same district said she could not register for the cash transfer program after local authorities told her she was ineligible because her appeal was still pending at the tribunal. She had mapped herself to her mother, who was included in the final rolls, but both she and her father were excluded. "Just because our names have been deleted can't mean that we don't get any government benefits," she said.
A 45-year-old tailor in West Bengal said his 14-year-old son was denied a government scholarship of 1,200 rupees (about US$13) because both he and his wife had been struck off the rolls. The scholarship is for students from religious minority backgrounds, and school authorities had made parental inclusion on the voter lists an eligibility requirement. "The scholarship was necessary for him," the man said.
The Calcutta High Court in July directed the authorities not to take any "coercive steps" and to continue distributing subsidized food rations and issue government documents to those deleted from the SIR. However, deleted voters have had to continue to go to court to challenge the authorities' refusal to comply. A 37-year-old man whose appeal is still pending in the tribunal approached the court in April after local authorities refused to issue a residence certificate for him. The man had secured a place in a PhD program at a public university but needed the document to finalize his admission.
Using SIR for Unlawful Expulsions
In December 2025, Home Minister Amit Shah defended the SIR as a means to "detect, delete, deport" alleged "infiltrators." However, the Supreme Court clarified in May 2026 that the SIR was not a citizenship test. Indian authorities have also explicitly stated that documents such as passport, voter cards, and Aadhaar are not proof of citizenship. However, a valid voter card is inevitably tied to citizenship because it is presumptively issued only to Indian citizens. Those whose names have been struck off the rolls face heightened suspicion of being undocumented immigrants, a serious consequence given the ongoing unlawful and forcible expulsions of ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh.
Since May 2025, Indian authorities have unlawfully expelled ethnic Bengali Muslims to Bangladesh without due process. After the SIR process was completed, the BJP state government in West Bengal set up detention camps in May 2026 under the "detect, delete, deport" policy and continued arbitrary detentions.
In September, police in West Bengal attempted to detain a woman in Bankura district after her name was deleted from voter rolls. "The police said they had been ordered to detain people whose names were excluded from the SIR," her lawyer said. "They called her an illegal migrant." Her appeal has been pending in the tribunal since April.
A 26-year-old queer Muslim woman in West Bengal's Hooghly district said that landlords turned down her request to rent apartments and at least three organizations had rejected her job applications because her name was deleted from voter lists. "I feel scared," she said, "What if they send me to Bangladesh just because my name is not on the voter list?"
