Why the ruckus over electoral rolls in Bihar?

India Today

6 days ago

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated August 18, 2025)It is a sultry August morning in Patna, and the Sadar block office wears the quiet, composed air of a still life portrait. Three officers sit at their desks, a laptop loaded with draft electoral rolls before them, a wall pasted with printed lists...and zero visitors. Not a single elector has walked in to check their status or file a complaint. 'We'll wait,' mutters Dharmendra Kumar, one of the officials, resigned to the tedium. Five days later, his station finally sees movement. Two men walk in, saying their names are missing from the draft list. The lethargy bears no hint of the storm brewing in Bihar's polity: the state's electoral rolls have shed 6.56 million names, a staggering 8.3 per cent reduction that has shrunk the electorate from 78.9 million voters in January 2025 to 72.4 million in seven months.advertisementThis massive pruning emerged from the Election Commission of India's (ECI) special intensive revision (SIR), a month-long exercise that deployed some 84,000 booth-level officers across 90,712 polling stations, backed by 160,000 booth-level agents from 12 political parties, 3,000-odd electoral registration officers (EROs) and thousands of volunteers.
The deletions appear to follow an administrative method and logic. Of the 6.56 million names, 2.23 million are classified as deceased, 3.63 million as having permanently migrated or absent/ untraceable, and 700,000 as duplicate entries across multiple locations. Only 120,000 names, a mere 1.8 per cent of the total, are stated to have been deleted for not submitting enumeration forms by the July 25 deadline. These individuals have been conferred the right to apply for reinstatement with proper documentation, potentially making their exclusion temporary. This benign picture is in stark contrast to the Opposition's narrative of mass disenfranchisement, produced by design via a hectic but chaotic bureaucratic quickie.
To put this in perspective, the previous electoral roll published in January 2024 had deleted 1.6 million names while simultaneously adding 2.8 million new voters to the rolls. That exercise now appears extremely modest compared to the current purge. The sheer scale of the SIR deletions, four times larger than the previous revision, has turned it into a political flashpoint that threatens to reshape Bihar's electoral landscape just months before the state heads to polls.
THE MILLIONS MORE AT RISKThe real impact of the SIR will begin with who may yet be removed. The Election Commission has celebrated the fact of 80 per cent of the 72.4 million voters included in the draft roll submitting their supporting documents alongside their enumeration forms, the verification of which has just begun. But that also leaves out a chunky 20 per cent, approximately 14.5 million voters, for whom the clock is ticking with a September 1 deadline to submit documents that prove their eligibility. Political analyst and Swaraj Abhiyan founder Yogendra Yadav warns that voters who fail to submit documents—or fail the subsequent verification—are also at risk. The fall-off could swell the overall deletions well beyond the current 6.5 million.advertisementThe controversy over acceptable documentation has emerged as the most contentious aspect of the entire exercise. The Election Commission's list of 11 acceptable documents conspicuously excludes Aadhaar, voter ID (issued by the ECI itself) and ration cards, the three most common forms of identification for Bihar's poor and marginalised populations. Instead, the ECI demands documents such as birth certificates, passports, matriculation certificates, land ownership papers, or pre-1987 government employment IDs, documents that are out of reach for many in Bihar, particularly those from rural areas.Recognising that millions of voters lack conventional documentation, authorities have created 'vanshawalis' or family trees linking current voters to ancestors listed in the 2003 rolls. These genealogical records, authenticated by panchayats, have enabled approximately 49.6 million voters to establish their eligibility without producing birth certificates or educational documents. This creative solution illustrates the adaptability/absurdity of the entire exercise—the ECI simultaneously insists on documentary proof of citizenship while accepting village-level authentication of family trees.The Supreme Court, hearing petitions challenging the SIR, has advised the ECI to accept Aadhaar and voter ID cards as valid proof of eligibility. Yet, the commission has steadfastly refused to expand its documentary requirements, maintaining that these commonly held documents do not adequately establish citizenship. The apex court has warned that it will intervene if there is evidence of 'mass exclusion', but has not specified what threshold would trigger such intervention. This ambiguity has left millions of voters in a limbo, uncertain whether their names will survive the final cut when the electoral rolls are published on September 30.advertisement
THE SOUND OF SILENCEDespite the scale of potential disenfranchisement, the ECI's claim-and-objection process has been met with an almost eerie silence. As of August 7, 5,015 individual complaints had been filed. More remarkably, not a single claim or objection had been submitted by any of the 160,000 booth-level agents deployed by political parties. The Commission has repeatedly emphasised that no name can be deleted from the draft roll without an ERO or assistant ERO conducting an inquiry and providing the affected voter a fair hearing. Orders for deletion must be written down and reasoned out, with provisions for appeal first to the district magistrate and then to the chief electoral officer. But there are huge doubts over whether this elaborate process can handle the potential challenges to millions of names in the limited time-frame, for elections are due in October-November.advertisementMeanwhile, Opposition press conferences, led by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and the Congress in Bihar, thunder with accusations of 'votebandi' and deliberate disenfranchisement aimed at helping the ruling NDA, particularly the BJP. They want the ECI to provide comprehensive data on deleted voters so that patterns on how the exercise unfolded across constituencies can be analysed.The Opposition's predicament was apparent in a moment of political theatre when RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav brandished a voter ID card bearing the number RAB2916120, claiming his name had been struck off the rolls. The ECI's swift rebuttal, confirming that his legitimate card (RAB0456228) remained intact and that the displayed number had never been issued, not only embarrassed the leader of the Opposition in Bihar but also exposed the challenge that political parties are facing: without verified cases of wrongful deletion, their protests lack the ammunition needed to mount legal challenges or mobilise public opinion.advertisement
FALSE ALARM: RJD's Tejashwi Yadav's presser in Patna after EC released the draft voters' list, Aug. 2. (Photo: ANI)
MYTHS AND PARALLELSA persistent narrative surrounding the SIR is that it targets Muslim voters, particularly in the frontier districts where communal rhetoric often paints them as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. The data presents a more nuanced picture. Among the 10 districts with the highest deletion rates, five—Purnia, Kishanganj, Madhubani, Bhagalpur and Sitamarhi—do have significant Muslim populations (see Is SIR an Anti-Muslim Exercise?). Yet, this correlation is muddied on closer scrutiny.Kishanganj, Bihar's only Muslim-majority district (68 per cent of the population), did indeed see deletions of 11.8 per cent, higher than the state average of 8.3 per cent. But Katihar and Araria, with Muslim populations of 44 and 43 per cent, respectively, saw deletion rates of 8.27 per cent and 7.59 per cent, below the state average. Tellingly, Gopalganj district, which recorded the highest deletion rate at 15 per cent, does not have a particularly high Muslim population. Anyway, these variations suggest that while the overlap between Muslim concentration areas and high deletions warrants investigation, other factors like migration, documentation unavailability, or even administrative efficiency may be equally significant. 'No direct correlation can be ascribed as yet,' says poll analyst Amitabh Tiwari.Another pattern shows how difficult it is to make out a narrative of targeted disenfranchisement. In 112 of Bihar's 243 assembly seats, voter deletions exceed the victory margins from the 2020 election, a statistic that suggests nearly half the state's constituencies could see their electoral outcomes altered by the revision exercise. But a deep dive shows that the NDA partners—BJP with 27 seats, Janata Dal (United) or JD(U) with 29 seats, and the Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) with 1 seat—collectively hold 57 of these 112 vulnerable constituencies. This could mean the NDA's own MLAs are as exposed to the electoral impact of the SIR as their opponents. 'Without a caste-wise breakdown, particularly on whether deletions are high among Muslims and Yadavs, it's impossible to determine if the BJP stands to gain from the exercise,' says Tiwari.
GIRL, DELETEDWhat the data conclusively reveals is a shocking gender disparity—women constitute 55 per cent of all deleted voters despite making up only 47.7 per cent of Bihar's electorate. In fact, in 43 of Bihar's 243 assembly constituencies, women account for 60 per cent or more of the deletions. The most extreme case is Rajpur, a constituency reserved for Scheduled Castes in Kaimur district, where 69 per cent of the deleted voters are women. The figure for Kaimur—a hilly, forested outback—as a whole is 64 per cent, followed closely by Buxar at 63 per cent.This gendered pattern of exclusion reflects the deeper structural inequalities in Bihar society. Women, particularly those in rural areas, are less likely to possess the documentary proof required by the SIR. They also migrate after marriage, often lack education certificates due to lower literacy rates, and have limited interaction with government institutions that issue official documents. The irony is particularly bitter given that women voters are credited with playing a decisive role in recent Bihar elections, forming a crucial vote bank for both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Their systematic exclusion threatens not just individual voting rights but the democratic legitimacy of any mandate emerging from the upcoming election.
GRAVE CONCERNSPerhaps no aspect of the SIR has generated more controversy than the 2.23 million voters classified as deceased. Opposition parties have time and again demanded transparency about the methodology used, questioning how the ECI verified such a massive number of deaths in a state where, by the government's own admission, death registrations remain woefully low.This opacity has fuelled speculation about arbitrary deletions, with Opposition leaders suggesting that many 'dead' voters might be very much alive but temporarily absent during the SIR drive. The fear is particularly acute among families of migrant workers, estimated at over 7.4 million, who often spend months or years in other states and may have been marked deceased simply because they weren't present when officials visited.On the ground, the SIR has also been a tragicomedy of errors at times. Booth-level officers racing against impossible deadlines have recorded fathers' names as simply 'Father', wives with the surname 'Husband'. On the flip side, in Dhanarua block of Patna district, a government clerk embroiled in a marital discord case had submitted a falsified death certificate to have his wife declared deceased and struck off the rolls. Only the diligence of an alert BLO exposed this 'electoral murder'.The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has now moved the Supreme Court, seeking directions to the ECI to publish names and specific reasons such as death, relocation or duplication for those excluded from the draft roll. While the July 20 lists shared with booth-level agents of political parties included names, EPIC ID numbers and reasons for deletion, the August 1 lists omitted the last detail.Yet, in a state where power cuts can spark spontaneous protests, the deletion of 6.5 million names from voter rolls has been met with an uncanny stillness. Even in districts like Gopalganj, where one in six voters has been struck off the rolls, the streets remain calm. Many analysts attribute this to Bihar's voter apathy, characterised by chronically low voter turnout, barely 60 per cent in recent elections. Which, in turn, means 40 per cent of the voters have limited investment in their electoral rights. The ECI's month-long window for filing objections has also provided a safety valve, allowing voters to believe they can reclaim their names through proper procedures. While the silence at the draft roll offices may feel deceptively serene now, democracy itself is perhaps undergoing a decisive churn in Bihar.Subscribe to India Today Magazine- EndsMust Watch