Electoral Systems
https://thewire.in/rights/deleted-by-design-the-institutional-disenfranchisement-of-women-in-bihar
In Bihar, democracy has long worn a distinctly feminine face. In the 2020 assembly elections, women’s turnout was 59.7%, while men’s was 54.6% – marking the third election in a row where female turnout exceeded male turnout in the state. In the same election, women outpolled men in 167 out of 243 constituencies.
This pattern extends beyond state polls. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar as well, women pulled ahead: their turnout being around 59.45%, compared to men at about 53%. The trend of women leading in electoral participation is not a fluke but a structural feature of Bihar’s recent politics. Against this backdrop, the SIR’s disproportionate removal of women from the rolls doesn’t merely shrink numbers – it targets the very group that has historically turned out with strength, frequently swung margins, and shaped agendas.
Even before the revision, Bihar’s women were underrepresented in its electorate. On Jan 1, 2025, the roll had 914 women per 1,000 men, already below Bihar’s census ratio of 918. After SIR, that slid to just 894:1000. This translates to the fact that women constitute 59.7% of the reduction in the electorate from January 2025 to September 2025, with districts like Gopalganj, Madhubhani and Kishanganj seeing the largest proportion of deleted women electors.
The roots of this disproportionate exclusion lie in the texture of women’s lives and the structural vulnerabilities that surround documentation.
by Himanshi Yadav and Madhav Deepak
27/10/2025
The Election Commission of India (ECI) on Monday (October 27) announced that the nationwide special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls will commence with 12 states and union territories in what it termed as the “second phase” of the exercise that first began in Bihar in June and ended last month.
The SIR will be conducted in Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep. It will start from November 4 and the draft roll will be published on December 9. The final electoral rolls will be published on February 7.
27/10/2025
Until recently, India’s electoral regime has been characterised by a laudable anxiety and democratic imagination to ensure that the election authorities planned for voters’ adversity, precarity, dispossession and even their emotional ties. In other words, voters were considered to be ordinary residents.
What the narrowing confines of ‘real’ Indians means
This administrative openness is now deliberately being narrowed down. The voice of citizens has become something to be legally proven with an unprecedented stringency. This bureaucratic constriction demonstrates that India is entering a dark new terrain.
It is also important to remember the non-documentary ways in which belonging and identification work in practice in the Indian state.
The starkest example of this is the recent crackdown on Bengali-speaking migrants across India. Bengali migrants have been detained in Rajasthan, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and recently several have left Delhi and Gurugram before they were accused of being “illegal” Bangladeshis.
Similarly, thousands of Muslims in Gujarat – many of whom possessed the supposedly correct documents – were recently rendered homeless after a similar crackdown.
Being documented or holding the correct papers – including the much-vaunted Aadhaar – does not anymore qualify anyone for Indian citizenship nor protect them from violence. What India is seeing today is the creation of a new category of people whose citizenship is suspect because of caste, class, gender, name, language, occupation and, even, speech, dress and deportment.
What both Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision and Assam’s National Register of Citizens demonstrate is that even the most heavily documented could be swallowed up by the bureaucratic machine and spat out as inadequate.
What is clear is that documents and identity cards have assumed monstrous powers over marginalised lives and that the state is clearly going further down the path of sorting out who can and cannot belong in New India.
by Nayanika Mathur & Tarangini Sriraman
20/08/2025
Until recently, India’s electoral regime has been characterised by a laudable anxiety and democratic imagination to ensure that the election authorities planned for voters’ adversity, precarity, dispossession and even their emotional ties. In other words, voters were considered to be ordinary residents.
What the narrowing confines of ‘real’ Indians means
This administrative openness is now deliberately being narrowed down. The voice of citizens has become something to be legally proven with an unprecedented stringency. This bureaucratic constriction demonstrates that India is entering a dark new terrain.
It is also important to remember the non-documentary ways in which belonging and identification work in practice in the Indian state.
The starkest example of this is the recent crackdown on Bengali-speaking migrants across India. Bengali migrants have been detained in Rajasthan, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, and recently several have left Delhi and Gurugram before they were accused of being “illegal” Bangladeshis.
Similarly, thousands of Muslims in Gujarat – many of whom possessed the supposedly correct documents – were recently rendered homeless after a similar crackdown.
Being documented or holding the correct papers – including the much-vaunted Aadhaar – does not anymore qualify anyone for Indian citizenship nor protect them from violence. What India is seeing today is the creation of a new category of people whose citizenship is suspect because of caste, class, gender, name, language, occupation and, even, speech, dress and deportment.
What both Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision and Assam’s National Register of Citizens demonstrate is that even the most heavily documented could be swallowed up by the bureaucratic machine and spat out as inadequate.
What is clear is that documents and identity cards have assumed monstrous powers over marginalised lives and that the state is clearly going further down the path of sorting out who can and cannot belong in New India.
by Nayanika Mathur & Tarangini Sriraman
20/08/2025
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar uttered lies in response to the questions and deliberately evaded many of them in the press conference he addressed in the wake of Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s expose of the alleged vote theft in Mahadevapura Assembly Constituency in Karnataka during the 2024 general elections.
It is worthwhile to prove by examining one of the answers of Gyanesh Kumar, in the press conference, that in the words of Ambedkar he “came under the thumb of the executive” and affirmed the apprehensions of SC: “A person (Election Commissioner), who is in a state of obligation or feels indebted to the one who appointed him, fails the nation.”
That answer was concerning Kumar’s demand for an affidavit from Rahul Gandhi with regards to the aforementioned electoral fraud and not asking such an affidavit from Anurag Thakur, Lok Sabha MP, of the ruling BJP who claimed similar allegations in multiple constituencies in several states including in Rae Bareli, UP, from where Rahul Gandhi won the election.
S.N. Sahu
20/08/2025
- EC's Credibility Under Scrutiny as Survey Shows Plummeting Trust Amid Political Firestorm
- 65 Lakh Deletions Later: SC Orders Disclosure, EC Cornered, Opposition Seizes the Moment
- Oath Politics, Silence on Forms Received and Number of 'Illegal' Immigrants: EC's Seven Non-Answers
- Lost Wages, Lost Documents and Rs 100 to Fill Out Forms: Accounts From a Bihar SIR Public Hearing
- EC ‘Subjecting 2.9 Cr Voters to Rigorous Exercise to Identify Handful Illegal Immigrants’: Ex-CEC O.P. Rawat on Bihar SIR