Maya Devi lives in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Delhi, a precarious life but one that nonetheless gave her a voice in the world’s biggest democracy—until now.
She is among more than 130 million people who have been removed from India’s electoral rolls on various grounds, according to data released by the Election Commission. Those removals have prompted anger, accusations of foul play and a new surge of protests challenging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the nationalist leader of the world’s most populous country.
Leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-led movement, were detained early Tuesday at a protest site where they chanting slogans to demand the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar. At the weekend, more than 2,400 protesters were temporarily detained. On Monday, opposition leaders marched to the Supreme Court seeking its intervention over the voter lists.
While voter rights are also a hot topic in the United States amid debate over who can vote, how and with what kind of identification, in the country of 1.4 billion people the fury is over the basic removal of names equivalent to the entire population of Mexico.
The official position is that the names removed are of those who are dead, are duplicates, are absent from their homes, untraceable or have permanently moved. But opponents of the government say the changes could benefit Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
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“I have been voting for decades, and suddenly that right has been taken away from me and my entire family. I’m shocked,” Devi told Newsweek.
“There are six or seven people in my family, and none of us can read or write. All our names have been removed from the voter list… All of a sudden, this year officials came with a form and told us we were no longer on the list," she added.
Critics accuse Kumar of overseeing a voter-list revision that risks disenfranchising eligible citizens. The Election Commission and BJP deny allegations of political manipulation. BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi said that the number of those removed did not include valid voters.
The Election Commission said the figure referred to electors marked as absent, shifted, deceased or duplicate in the draft rolls, and did not represent the number of names deleted from the final electoral rolls, according to the Free Press Journal.
Newsweek contacted the government and Election Commission for comment.
Hrishika Jain, a legal scholar, told Newsweek that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), an exercise to verify and update India's electoral rolls, must be rolled back. “There’s no fair way to do it.”
Jain, an assistant professor of law at the National Law School of India University, said the process disproportionately affects people without stable housing, including migrant workers who regularly return to their villages for seasonal work, or who struggle to access older family documents or establish their residency.
“It's sort of requiring an absurdly high degree of literacy and consistency from populations that cannot provide that,” Jain said. She raised concerns about what happens to people who are removed from the rolls. “The implications could extend beyond voting rights, citing potential consequences for housing rehabilitation claims,” she added.
Election impact
The potential electoral implications of the revision are also under scrutiny.
Political analyst Neelanjan Sircar, who researches Indian elections and political behaviour, analysed the relationship between people being removed from the voter-roll and electoral outcomes in West Bengal’s 2026 election, in which Modi’s party secured an unprecedented victory.
He told Newsweek that the median constituency-level contraction in voter rolls was around 10 percent compared with 2024, meaning half of the constituencies saw a decline of about 10 percent or more.
At that level of contraction, Sircar's analysis predicted an approximately four-percentage-point swing from the Trinamool Congress (TMC), a regional opposition party, to the BJP, suggesting that the SIR may have helped the BJP at the TMC’s expense.
The deletions occurred in two phases: first, voters classified as absent, shifted, deceased or duplicated; and later, those flagged for “logical discrepancies” in their records.
Sircar cited a Sabar Institute audit finding that Muslims accounted for more than 70 percent of the 2.7 million voters removed in the second phase. He said, "the lack of a government order specifying the rules made the process difficult to audit."
Praveen Rai, a political analyst at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, said there was no credible evidence that voters from any religious or caste group had been deliberately removed from electoral rolls to benefit the BJP.
Rai said that "the fight of illegal immigrants in hordes to Bangladesh, widely documented by western media and acknowledged by the government of the neighbouring country, is a testimony that the deletions done by ECI were mostly valid."
Rashmi Singh, a political sociologist, told Newsweek that while voters can approach local booth-level officers to seek reinstatement, navigating the process can be difficult, particularly when locating older electoral rolls.
The BJP’s extensive booth-level network could help its supporters resolve discrepancies and re-register, while minorities like Muslims and other voters without similar support may struggle, she said.
Rai, whose research interests include electoral competitions and opinion polling in India, said that attacks on the Election Commission and calls to scrap SIR and return to paper ballots could undermine public confidence in a constitutional body. "It will reinforce the perception of democratic downslide and reduce the growing standing of the country in global order," he told Newsweek.
However, Jain argued that calls for Kumar to resign would not, on their own, address concerns about the Election Commission’s independence. She pointed to the executive’s role in appointing election commissioners, saying "changes to the appointment process were needed to strengthen the institution’s independence."
Devi said that the removal of voter rights compounded the insult after her family’s home had been bulldozed, leading them to find their informal shelter.
“We were told to go back to where we came from or rent a place in Delhi, but we cannot afford that. We want our voting rights back,” Devi said. “We don’t know what to do, whom to contact or how to get our names back."