On Saturday, New Delhi, the Indian capital, was under siege. The Indian government deployed more than 20,000 police and paramilitary personnel, barricaded the city center, and suspended internet access. By evening, more than 7,000 people were detained by the police, including leaders from India’s opposition parties, lawyers, and journalists. Despite the crackdown, thousands turned out in Delhi on Monday to protest with even greater vigor.

The repressive effort sought to deter a planned protest at Jantar Mantar, a traditional protest site in New Delhi. The protest centered on two core demands: the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner and the rollback of a nationwide process known as Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

The chief election commissioner heads the national electoral body and is appointed on the recommendation of a committee headed by the prime minister. The SIR ostensibly seeks to clean up and update the electoral rolls but has removed 130 million Indians from the rolls—more than half the number of Americans eligible to vote in the midterm elections.

The troubles truly began in the summer of 2025. Several Indian states were about to hold elections for their state legislatures. Ahead of those elections, the Election Commission announced an electoral revision in those states, citing the need to “clean up” electoral rolls. Numerous voters would be required to prove that they were citizens and entitled to be on the rolls by producing one or more documents from a select list. Election Commission officials would scrutinize the documents and either accept or reject them.

Judicial avoidance Civil society groups and political activists promptly challenged the proposed electoral revisions before the Supreme Court of India in June 2025. They questioned the power of the Election Commission to undertake electoral revisions at such a scale. India’s election law does authorize the commission to undertake a revision of electoral rolls in specific electoral constituencies, provided it records its reasons in writing. The petitioners argued that it does not grant the Election Commission overarching power to require voters already on the rolls to prove their eligibility afresh.

The petitioners also argued that Election Commission’s list of acceptable documents was exclusionary and would result in large scale disenfranchisement. In India, access to documents issued by the government depends heavily on caste, class and gender. Many people simply lack necessary documents or the ability to navigate the bureaucracy to obtain them.

For months, the Supreme Court did not rule on the legality of electoral revisions on such a vast scale, allowing the exercise to become a fait accompli. Instead, it engaged in prolonged courtroom negotiations with the Election Commission over which documents Indian voters would have to provide to remain on the electoral rolls. There was an extended debate on whether Aadhaar, India’s national digital identity document, would be accepted.

But even as the legal debates continued, exclusions from electoral rolls mounted. In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had never won a state election, nine million people—around 12% percent of the electorate—found themselves excluded from the rolls.

Faced with these exclusions, and still unwilling to rule on the legality of the SIR, the Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of creating an entire administrative machinery: tribunals staffed by judicial officers to hear appeals from excluded voters. When the petitioners warned that these tribunals would take years, if not decades, to resolve all the appeals, the Supreme Court judges effectively said that it was fine for excluded people to note vote in the upcoming election as long as they would eventually be put back on the rolls.

The West Bengal election went ahead using the new electoral rolls and the BJP won. One indication of how flawed the SIR may have been was that around 90% of the voters in West Bengal, whose appeals were decided, were eventually restored to the rolls. Nine out of every ten excluded voters had been wrongfully removed. Yet even as exclusions numbered in the millions in each state, the Supreme Court noted that the data did not indicate “systemic disenfranchisement.”

Unchecked bureaucrats Eventually, when the Supreme Court finally issued its judgment in the summer of 2026, it upheld the entire exercise. It affirmed the wide powers of the Election Commission to conduct the electoral revisions as it saw fit.

A central argument against the exercise was that by requiring every elector, including those already on the electoral rolls, to prove their eligibility afresh, the Election Commission was treating each individual as presumptively ineligible to vote. This was a grossly disproportionate exercise of power, particularly because more proportionate methods were available to the election commission.

The court rejected this argument too and, I believe, effectively immunized the commission from the requirement to act in a proportionate manner. As the legal scholar Vasudev Devadasan noted, the judgement had the effect of creating a "permanent class" of disenfranchised persons who simply cannot participate in political life.

The consequences soon became apparent: the new BJP government in West Bengal threatened, on more than one occasion, to cut off welfare benefits for people excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR. Although the Supreme Court noted that the SIR was not meant to determine citizenship, by the summer of 2026, that distinction was becoming difficult to sustain.

Beyond the threat to people’s welfare entitlements, there were widely reported cases of passport renewals being denied because applicants had been excluded from the electoral rolls through the SIR.

In 2020, the Indian government’s attempts to create a National of Citizens (NRC) had been widely criticized because of how it would force every individual to prove their citizenship to state authorities, and lead to widespread exclusion. After widespread protests across the country against it, the NRC was shelved. The SIR now appeared to be a way of introducing the NRC through the backdoor.

As the SIR proceeded across multiple states—with large-scale exclusions in each—patterns began to emerge: disproportionate exclusions among vulnerable and marginalized people and of religious minorities, especially Muslims; and the use of algorithms to exclude even voters who possessed the required documents, citing "logical discrepancies" such an arbitrary age gap between parent and child, judged by arbitrary criteria that varied from state to state.

Other disturbing facts also came to light. In certain neighborhoods, people had submitted pre-filled forms in bulk, seeking to have Muslims removed from off the electoral rolls by questioning their citizenship. India’s electoral law allows third parties to object to anyone’s inclusion on the electoral rolls.

In Delhi, the omission of some prominent people from the rolls provoked public outrage. The Election Commission then introduced a “VIP portal” through which their names could be restored, creating a two-tier system of class privilege.

A tenacious reporter Against this backdrop, an investigative report by Ritika Chopra, a journalist with the Indian Express newspaper in the last week of September, landed like a bombshell. Her report showed that although the Election Commission’s decisions were supposed to be taken by consensus among its three commissioners, the chief election commissioner had been taking them unilaterally, often over the objections of, and sometimes without involving, the other commissioners. (The Election Commission responded by describing differing “views and observations” as part of “deliberation in any institution.”)

More reports followed, documenting more unilateral decisions, opaque algorithms built by private corporations, and the increasing centralization of authority within the Election Commission to add or remove voters. It was a clear departure from India’s decentralized electoral system, which is designed to guard against decisions made in bad faith.

These reports crystallized latent anger, particularly against the chief election commissioner. Under Indian electoral law, election commissioners are appointed by a committee in which the political executive holds a two-to-one majority; they are, in effect, executive appointments. The Supreme Court’s 2023 attempt to reform this system was bypassed by subsequent legislation. The court then left a challenge to that legislation on the back burner. All of this explains why the chief election commissioner became the primary focus of public anger.

The story of the SIR is both an account of large-scale voter disenfranchisement in India and one of institutional crisis. Two failures converged: the failure to entrench the Election Commission’s independence in law and in the Constitution, and the failure of the Supreme Court to intervene despite evidence of disenfranchisement placed before it. Together they culminated in the furious popular protests in Delhi and the Indian government’s crackdown.

It is difficult to see how this story ends. The right to vote is hard won and its loss keenly felt. History shows that once people lose confidence in the institutions meant to protect that right, restoring their trust is exceedingly difficult. A long shadow hangs over electoral integrity in India. Lifting it will require urgent, systemic reforms. Whether those reforms will come remains uncertain.