Kanchan and his son sit on his bed, next to Kamal, a relative, in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Bela Slum in New Delhi, India, October 13, 2026.
Elke Scholiers for NPR
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Elke Scholiers for NPR
NEW DELHI – Like many Indians, Kanchan goes by one name and lives in deprived neighborhoods. His house is built of sheet metal and tarpaulin, under a viaduct in the capital New Delhi. And like many marginalized people, Kanchan was proud of her right to vote – a rare equalizer in an unequal India.
“It’s important because it shows that we are citizens,” Kanchan said on a recent October day, sitting on a plastic chair as vehicles passed overhead.
But a few weeks ago, Kanchan said about 500 adults had been removed from the voting rolls in this community around a bridge. They discovered it thanks to another resident authorized to consult the electoral lists as a representative of a political party.
They were among some 130 million names who were removed during a review of voter rolls that began last year in June.
This figure is an estimate by Yogendra Yadav, an elections expert and prominent critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Nevertheless, the BJP cited this figure as authoritative in its defense of the revision of the electoral rolls. The lists once had 980 million names.
“The government chooses people who support it,” Kanchan told NPR, accusing the BJP of changing voter rolls to disenfranchise communities opposed to the party. This is a widely held belief among critics of the electoral review process, including former Chief Election Commissioner of India, SY Quraishi. “Normally the voters choose the government, here the government chose the voters,” said Quraishi, who held the position from 2010 to 2012.
The Election Commission of India, which oversees election review, is ostensibly independent. But critics accuse Chief Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of being partial to Prime Minister Modi’s party. And it was the party, not the commission, that defended the revision. In a video posted on the BJP’s YouTube channel in early October, he indicated that these approximately 130 million deleted names concerned people who had died, had duplicate entries, had moved or were absent for another reason.
Kanchan said that in her community, people were removed on the grounds that they had moved, even though an election official came to visit and she “made me sign and give him the form.”
And activists who help Indians re-register voters say many others were removed because they were unable to provide information that had never been required of voters before, such as demonstrating that their parents or grandparents had voted in elections more than two decades ago. Others had to prove who they were after discrepancies emerged between how their names were spelled on voter rolls and how they were spelled on census forms distributed to some, but not all, voters.
A notice was handed to Nasir Malik, a community activist from a New Delhi neighborhood called Mustafabad, who held it up recently. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he told NPR. “If this was a problem, how was I able to vote in the previous election?”
Differences in the spelling of names are so common in India that experts said they were not considered a problem in previous revisions of voter rolls, as long as the local election official thought they were the same person.
At a cafe in downtown New Delhi, a lawyer who has filed several petitions against the electoral roll review process said his country once prided itself on ensuring that every eligible adult could vote. Now the burden of proof was shifted to citizens to prove who they were, triggering “the largest exercise of disenfranchisement in human history,” said lawyer Kaustubh Chaturvedi. “This is an unconscionable process. What you actually did was take away the right to vote from almost everyone who needed it most.”
This is the largest deprivation of rights in numbers. In terms of proportion, Jim Crow laws led to a higher percentage of people disenfranchised in the United States, according to historian Carole Anderson, who has written extensively on voter suppression in black communities.
For Kanchan, 27, from the New Delhi community around the bridge, her right to vote was not just about voting.
Kanchan and his son pose at their home in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Bela Slum in New Delhi, India, October 13, 2026.
Elke Scholiers for NPR
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Elke Scholiers for NPR
She is raising her 6-year-old son alone after her husband, a food delivery driver, was killed in a road accident four years ago. She supplements her teaching income with a monthly government stipend equivalent to $25 and free monthly food items such as rice, wheat and sugar. She feared that the authorities would deny her these services by questioning her citizenship, because she had been removed from the electoral roll. “They will cut us off little by little,” she worries.
These fears were particularly triggered after government officials in some BJP-ruled states pledged to remove people from aid programs if they were removed from the electoral roll.
After an outcry over voter suppression in September, the election commission said it worked with “integrity.” He said officers would help those removed from the voter rolls get reinstated. Sunil Kumar, a senior election official in Kanchan’s Chandi Chowk constituency, told NPR that his department was working to get the Kanchan community back on the voting rolls.
Any help now comes too late for some disenfranchised Indians, like Malika, who has only one name.
In the popular district of Mustafabad, Malika feared being accused of being an illegal migrant because she had been removed from the electoral roll. His concern stems from claims by powerful Home Minister Amit Shah, who first declared that the electoral review would aim to detect, eliminate and expel infiltrators. And as authorities tried to quell protests against the removal of voter review in October, Shah described opponents of voter review as protecting infiltrators. In India, this is often a dog whistle for Muslims in neighboring Bangladesh.
Malika, who is Muslim, says her voter registration card was one of the few ways she could prove who she was. She was born without a birth certificate, says she never went to school and that her parents died when she was young. “I didn’t have any elders,” she says. “I practically raised myself.”
She said she was removed from her old electoral roll in Mustafabad after moving two hours away – she could no longer pay the rent after her husband was killed in communal violence here six years ago. More than 40 people were killed, mostly Muslims, by Hindu mobs. Malika now travels every day to Mustafabad where she works as a cleaner, earning $80 a month, which she says barely feeds her three children.
She said no election official ever visited her during her re-searches to take down her details, which they were supposed to do so she could re-register to vote. Malika said she visited her local agent on a recent Friday, but lost a day of work without resolving anything.
Malika, a cleaning lady, poses in the predominantly Muslim neighborhood of Mustafabad in New Delhi, India, October 13, 2026.
Elke Scholiers for NPR
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Elke Scholiers for NPR
“These people, the government officials, like to sit in their air-conditioned offices and make certain rules,” she said, referring to the election review process. “But they really need to come out into the field and see what it’s like,” she says, “to work under the scorching sun, to be poor like we are.”
For now, she signals her identity through the plastic bracelets on her arms, colored orange, white and green – the colors of the Indian flag. She smiled as she clinked them. “This is also my India,” she said.
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