Electoral Systems
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
A post-poll survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ Lokniti programme reveals a stark drop in the percentage of voters expressing “high trust” in the EC between 2019 and 2025. EC's Credibility Under Scrutiny as Survey Shows Plummeting Trust Amid Political Firestorm - The Wire
The sharpest fall was recorded in Madhya Pradesh, where high trust plummeted from 57% to 17%. In Delhi, it fell from 60% to 21%, and in Uttar Pradesh, from 56% to 21%. Concurrently, the proportion of voters with “no trust” in the poll body nearly quadrupled in Madhya Pradesh (6% to 22%) and almost tripled in Delhi (11% to 30%).
The immediate catalyst for this confrontation is the ongoing SIR in poll-bound Bihar. The issue escalated on August 14 when the Supreme Court directed the EC to publish a detailed list of approximately 65 lakh electors excluded from the state’s draft rolls, stressing that “a high degree of transparency is required to inspire voters’ confidence”.
by Pavan Korada
18/08/2025
Investigations by The Hindu, The Reporters’ Collective, and The Wire have uncovered significant anomalies and inconsistencies in the electoral rolls, highlighting how bureaucratic hurdles disproportionately affect women and migrant workers. Many citizens struggle to meet increasingly stringent documentation requirements. 65 Lakh Deletions Later: SC Orders Disclosure, EC Cornered, Opposition Seizes the Moment - The Wire
Despite higher male migration and slightly higher male mortality in recent years, nearly 32 lakh women have been excluded from the voter rolls, compared with 25 lakh men—a discrepancy that raises urgent questions about systemic bias in the registration process.
Ironically, the one document that is nearly universally held by Indian citizens, the Aadhaar card, has not been accepted by the ECI as valid proof of identity
by Zoya Hasan
19/08/2025
- 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
- The Term 'Special Intensive Revision' Is Not in the EC's Rulebooks. Here's Why that's a Problem
- Bihar SIR Violates Legislative Intent of the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar’s Vision