In India, Citizens Brace for a Democratic Unraveling, by Fatima Khan – 13 October 2026

From New Lines Magazine

As revisions to voter rolls put more than 130 million people at risk of disenfranchisement, protesters have returned to the streets of Delhi

Sounam lost her younger brother, Faizan, in riots in Delhi six years ago. Officers of the Delhi Police were caught on camera forcing the 23-year-old to sing the national anthem as they beat him and three other Muslim men with their batons. Faizan succumbed to his injuries days later. He was the youngest of nine brothers and sisters. Recently, one of his siblings also died, of natural causes. Just as the seven who remained began to rebuild their lives, each of them received notices from India’s Election Commission asking them to prove their eligibility to remain on the draft voter rolls as part of a nationwide revision. The reason: Each had been listed as the son or daughter of someone claimed as a parent by six others, one of the many “logical discrepancies” cited in similar notices sent to millions across the country.

India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar received a notice. So did Delhi’s chief minister, Rekha Gupta, former Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar and veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Lal Krishna Advani. The Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and 94-year-old historian Romila Thapar got them too. In fact, one of the three election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, wasn’t spared either. India had nearly a billion voters during the 2024 national elections. Now, over 130 million Indians, more than the population of countries such as Japan, Egypt and the Philippines, have been left off the draft voter rolls in an exercise called the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR. 

While election officers went to the homes of the powerful to verify their papers and bring them back onto the voter roll, ordinary Indians have been running from pillar to post to have their names counted. Sounam and her siblings don’t know what to do next. “Our brother was forced to prove his Indianness until his last breath. Now, after his death, the rest of us are having to prove it by running around with documents to show that we are in fact Indian,” Sounam told New Lines.

The exercise began last year, when the Election Commission revised voter rolls in Bihar ahead of its state election. More than 6.5 million voters found their names missing in that state alone. In West Bengal, 13.6 million voters were flagged for “logical discrepancies” ahead of its state election in April, and nearly 9 million were ultimately removed from the rolls. The BJP won and formed its first government in the state, but in more than half of its 294 seats, total deletions were more than the victory margins. Muslims, who have largely voted against the BJP, were the most affected.

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Fatima Khan is a journalist based in New Delhi, India.

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