Indian election officials have imposed a strict deadline, giving voters in Bihar state only weeks to provide proof of their citizenship. This requirement for documents, which few individuals possess, is part of a voter registration overhaul slated for nationwide implementation, thereby triggering significant fears of widespread disenfranchisement. The Election Commission of India (ECI) announced this revision of voter rolls in June, in anticipation of upcoming elections in the eastern state.
The ECI stated that this exercise will subsequently be replicated across the entire nation, which has a population of 1.4 billion people. According to the ECI, the “intensive revision” was deemed necessary, in part, to prevent the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants.” Members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have long asserted that substantial numbers of undocumented Muslim migrants from neighboring Bangladesh have fraudulently entered India’s electoral rolls. Critics, however, argue that this overhaul could render vast numbers of Indian citizens unable to exercise their right to vote.
“You are being asked to produce documents that very few people have,” commented Asaduddin Owaisi, a prominent Muslim lawmaker. He further warned, “It will lead to mass disenfranchisement.” Opposition lawmakers contend that this initiative will disproportionately impact minorities, specifically including Muslims and Dalit communities, who occupy the lowest rung of India’s rigid caste hierarchy.
‘Engineered Exclusions’
All prospective voters in Bihar are now mandated to furnish proof of citizenship by July 25. Individuals who were registered in 2003, the last time a comprehensive scrutiny of the voter list took place in Bihar, are permitted to submit a copy of that previous registration. The remaining individuals — estimated by the ECI to be around 30 million people — are required to provide evidence of their place and date of birth. Furthermore, those born after 1987 must also provide proof of their parents’ Indian citizenship. This stringent requirement affects more than one-third of potential voters in Bihar, which is India’s third most populous and its poorest state.
Bihar also represents a crucial election battleground, as it is the only state within India’s northern Hindi-speaking belt where Modi’s BJP has exclusively governed in a coalition. Bihar’s main opposition party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, along with other parties and activists, has challenged the election commission’s directive in the Supreme Court. The court petition states, “It is being used to justify aggressive and opaque revisions of electoral rolls that disproportionately target Muslim, Dalit and poor (Indian) migrant communities.” It further asserts, “They are not random patterns but… engineered exclusions.”
Unlike many other countries, India does not possess a single, unique national identity card. The widely adopted biometric-linked “Aadhaar” identity card is notably not among the documents listed by the ECI as acceptable proof for this process. Acceptable documents include birth certificates, passports, and matriculation records. Of these, most people are likely to rely on their matriculation certificates. However, even these are in short supply in Bihar, a state with some of India’s lowest literacy rates.
According to an analysis published in The Indian Express newspaper, only 35% of people in the state actually possess such a document. Jagdeep Chhokar from the New Delhi-based Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) commented, “In Bihar, where literacy is not very high, many people are not likely to have the kind of documents the ECI has demanded.” He concluded that “The poor, poorly educated, uneducated and minorities will be the most impacted.”
