There is a famous quote by Lyndon B Johnson: “The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice.”
Strikingly, India’s freedom movement, from the very beginning, echoed the demand for equal voting rights. In 1895, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was among the first to demand universal adult franchise. He realised the power of voting rights back then, but after 131 years, it seems India is in reverse gear.
The Election Commission of India (ECI), whose core principle is that every single voter counts and that no eligible citizen should be excluded, has now initiated a seemingly contradictory exercise that has led to the deletion of 90 lakh voter names from the West Bengal electoral roll. More troubling is the simultaneous erosion of transparency—once the ECI’s guiding principle—and its slide into opacity, which itself speaks of institutional complicity.
Erasure by Design: The Disenfranchisement of 90 Lakh
Interestingly, in the 2021 West Bengal election, the All India Trinamool Congress led the Bharatiya Janata Party by approximately 60.6 lakh votes. In the 2024 general election, this margin came down to around 42.4 lakh. Then, suddenly, the Election Commission of India announced a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll. In West Bengal, the SIR process began in October 2025, and by February, when the list was released, 63 lakh names had already been deleted.
Now, just yesterday, after the Supreme Court of India refused to accept a plea to extend the time before the electoral lists were frozen at midnight, the ECI released its final supplementary list. After the first phase of SIR, about 63.66 lakh electors were removed from the electoral roll, while 60,06,675 were kept under adjudication. Following the final supplementary list released on April 7, 2026, around 27.16 lakh of those under adjudication were found ineligible and excluded.
Earlier, the total number of voters was 7.66 crore. Now it has been reduced to 6.77 crore—a fall of 11.62%. What was valid till 2024 has suddenly become invalid. By this logic, is the ECI itself suggesting that the 2024 general election was flawed?
Gender & Identity: The Target of a Not-So-Silent Purge
Before the revision, women constituted nearly half of West Bengal’s electorate, with about 968 female voters for every 1,000 men—around 49%. However, SIR data show that over 53% of the deletions were women. The SIR has effectively taken us back to the basic struggle for women’s voting rights. It has disproportionately impacted female voters and likely altered the gender balance of the rolls. This strengthens the argument that the SIR process is not gender-neutral in its impact.
A few days ago, Yogendra Yadav said that the story of the SIR in West Bengal is one of the Election Commission’s desperate attempts at mass deletion of voters inconvenient to the BJP. Similarly, three months ago, the international media outlet The Guardian reported under the headline: “India’s electoral roll revision threatens democracy and Muslims, say critics.”
Today, it was reported that a total of 2,826 names have been deleted from the electoral rolls in Nandigram in the supplementary lists. Of these, 2,700 are Muslims. The proportion of minority Muslims among the deleted is staggering—95.5%. A similar pattern has been observed in data analysis by Ankit Jain, which reveals that Muslims have been disproportionately marked as ‘under adjudication’ in the SIR.
Institutional Opacity: When the Referee Deletes the Players
A curious case was also reported on 07/04/26, where the Appellate Tribunal noted that the Election Commission, “for technical reasons,” could not furnish the reasons for the deletion of INC candidate Motab Sheikh from the electoral roll. The Appellate Tribunal, headed by former High Court Chief Justice TS Sivagnanam, ordered the inclusion of Motab Sheikh in the voter roll after noting that he possessed an Aadhaar card, passport, and driving licence bearing his name, and that there was no discrepancy in his father’s name.
But the question remains: when there was no discrepancy, why was his name deleted? Should we now believe that the Guardian article was accurate?
However, from the Supreme Court to India’s political discourse, no one seems in the mood to take serious note of this travesty of democracy. Even if 10% of the names are wrongly deleted, the number rises to 9 lakh. And the future will repeatedly record that they were denied the time to prove their legitimate right to vote.
It seems that the mission of erasure has been accomplished. The ECI’s past slogans like “Every Vote Counts” and “No Voter to be Left Behind” now lie in the dustbin of history.
Thanks to the Supreme Court.
Thanks to the ECI.
Thanks to the entire system that built and propagated the hoax of “Ghuspetiya.”
The future will remember each one of your roles.
