A hastily organized effort to revise voter rolls in the eastern state of Bihar has been marked by technical glitches, absent documents and widespread confusion.
In June, India’s election commission gave officials in the eastern state of Bihar a monumental task: verify that each of the state’s 80 million registered voters is an Indian citizen, then upload the paperwork to prove it.
The deadline? Five weeks.
The commission said it was ordering the revision of voter rolls to identify outdated entries, eliminate duplicates and remove illegal immigrants. But as officials fanned out across this vast and impoverished state to knock on doors, and residents struggled to make sense of the new requirements, critics warned that millions of Indians could lose the right to vote — potentially reshaping the political future of the world’s largest democracy.
“This could lead to large-scale, officially sanctioned disenfranchisement,” said Jagdeep Chhokar, a founding member and trustee of the Association for Democratic Reforms, a New Delhi-based nonprofit that has petitioned the Supreme Court to challenge the revision effort.
The hastily organized registration drive has been marked by technical glitches, absent documents and widespread confusion, according to interviews with more than two dozen voters, election officers and experts. And the stakes are huge, with the exercise in Bihar meant to serve as a blueprint for other states to draft fresh voter lists over the next year.
A first draft of the new voter rolls in Bihar will be published on Friday. The final version is due Sept. 30, just weeks before voting is set to begin in local elections. Opponents of the campaign said the timing is no accident, and it is likely to boost the fortunes of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.
“Who doesn’t vote for the BJP? Migrant labor, the poor, Muslims,” said Mahua Moitra, a member of Parliament from the Trinamool Congress, an opposition party. “So the BJP wants them disenfranchised.”
The BJP’s national spokesperson and the Election Commission of India did not respond to requests for comment.
A commission under scrutiny
Routine revisions of electoral rolls frequently take place before national and state elections in India. Bihar’s state election body had just completed one such exercise earlier this year, according to a press release from the group on Jan. 7.
The last time Bihar undertook a full revision, in 2003, it took a year to complete, even though the process was substantially simpler. Officials then accepted proof of identity and residence using state-issued IDs. This time, the commission said, it would accept 11 different documents as proof of citizenship — but excluded widely held Indian identity cards and the commission’s own previously issued voter cards, as well as ration cards, often the only form of paperwork possessed by poor, rural families.
Manoj Kumar Jha, a member of Parliament from Rashtriya Janata Dal, an opposition party in Bihar, said India’s election commission had a duty to ensure a level political playing field. “They did not consult a single political party for the biggest decision they’ve taken in the last 30 years,” he said.
The election commission was already under mounting scrutiny from government critics, who allege the BJP has eroded the body’s historical independence.
In 2023, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the election commissioner should be selected by the president on the advice of a three-person committee made up of the prime minister, the chief justice and the leader of the opposition. That same year, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed a law that changed the makeup of the committee, replacing the chief justice with a minister from his own cabinet.
“The institutional takeover is complete,” Moitra said.
The first election commissioner to be appointed under the new rules entered office in February. Four months later, officials in Bihar were given their marching orders.
A race against time
Sweat dripped down Pammi Kumari’s face on a recent day as she walked from house to house in the village of Sonepur, 20 miles outside of Patna, the capital of Bihar. Holding a stack of forms in one hand and the pleats of her sari in the other, she knocked on the door of a small home.
It was her third visit to this address, she said, because the family didn’t have the right documents. No one answered, so she kept moving.
Kumari, a 42-year-old public school teacher, is one of thousands of public employees tasked by the election commission with leading the voter revision drive. It is grueling, repetitive work, she said — knocking on doors, waiting on people to fill out forms, collecting their documents, if they have them, and uploading the information to a mobile app that frequently malfunctions.
Every day, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Kumari said, she walked back and forth in the sweltering July heat across villages like this one, which stretch for miles across Bihar — long one of India’s poorest and most underdeveloped states.
“I often feel light-headed and dizzy,” Kumari said. After reaching home, she takes a short break to cook dinner for her family, then sits down to upload.
“There are no fixed working hours,” she said. “We have just been instructed to finish the job.”
Ramesh Kumar, 44, another teacher turned election officer in Sonepur, said the commission has instructed them to make at least three visits to each home. But time was already running out. “It is quite frustrating,” he said, “and there is a lot of pressure from above.”
No matter how many times they knocked on certain doors, the election officers said, many families simply didn’t have the required documents.
“We will only know what happens to those who don’t have documents after August 1,” Kumar said.
After the initial list is published Friday, people will have a month to file claims or objections. Then the election commission will decide who has the right to vote.
‘No one cares about us’
Anger is building in Sonepur.
“I will take to the streets in protest if my name is struck off the roll,” said Pintu Kumar Yadav, who runs a clinic in the village, a crowd gathering around him as he spoke.
Yadav claimed no election officer had come to his house yet. Many standing near him said the same.
Even a knock on the door came with no guarantees. Thirteen voters across three districts said they had received only a single form from election officers, even though the commission had called for each individual to fill out two forms and keep one as a receipt. Voters were supposed to fill out the forms themselves, the commission said. All 13 people said officers had done it for them.
Most critically, many voters said, they had never owned any of the documents the commission was now demanding of them.
“A poor man working on the fields to sustain himself and his family, will he have these documents?” Yadav asked rhetorically. “No.”
Pappu Thakur, 25, who lives with his parents in Sonepur, said he was instructed by an election officer to apply for a residence certificate. But the deadline was only six days away, and Thakur said he couldn’t afford the bribe usually required for an expedited application.
“I am unemployed,” he said. “Where will I get the money?”
Sixty miles away, in the village of Agiaon, Bhuti Dom and his family of six live in a small hut with a thatched roof. Like an estimated 25 million people in Bihar, they are Dalits — formerly known as “untouchables,” occupying the lowest rung of India’s caste hierarchy.
Bhuti earns less than $60 per month as a cleaner in a local politician’s house. His wife, Sanjhari Devi, weaves handheld fans out of bamboo. They have never been to school. But both follow politics closely and had participated in local and national elections since 2022.
Bhuti said he was confident they would remain on the new rolls. Officers had taken copies of their national identity cards, he said, and made them sign the forms. When told by a reporter that his national identity card was not among the documents the election commission said it would accept, he fell silent for a moment.
“We are subject to the whims of the government,” he said. “No one cares about us.”