The selective solidarity at the heart of India’s voter protests
The opposition is fighting voter exclusion without confronting the discrimination Muslims warned about in 2019.
Across India, opposition parties, students and farmers are protesting against a sweeping revision of electoral rolls that has removed some 130 million names. They are demanding the restoration of the old voter lists and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – as the Election Commission of India (ECI) calls the exercise – requires voters to prove their eligibility, often through old documents.
Six years ago, Muslims took to the streets to warn that making citizenship dependent on such paperwork could leave millions vulnerable to exclusion, particularly Muslims. Their warnings were largely ignored. Now that the threat of exclusion extends beyond Muslims, many who ignored their warnings are taking to the streets themselves.
I am proud to see common people across India taking risks for one another in these protests. But I cannot ignore the hypocrisy in the opposition’s response: while it is right to challenge the SIR, its demands leave untouched the citizenship law against which Muslims protested in 2019 and the suspicion cast on them as “infiltrators”.
The second stage is where the state had to make judgements. About six million voters whose forms showed what the ECI called “logical discrepancies” were sent to judicial officers. A discrepancy could be as small as a parent’s name spelt one way in the 2002 roll and another way now. The judicial officers removed 2.7 million people. Of those removed at this second stage, about 70 percent were identified as Muslim by surname in an analysis of the ECI’s published lists. Muslims make up about a quarter of the state’s electorate. Researchers at the Sabar Institute in Kolkata found that Muslims had, if anything, been more successful at tracing their families to the old rolls and were more likely to have been at home when officers visited. They were removed at the stage where the outcome turned on an official’s discretion.