Nearly a billion people in India are being asked to show documents to prove they should keep the right to vote. The exercise, billed by an election commission appointed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as cleaning India’s voter roll, has expunged over 130 million names — more than the population of Mexico. Tens of millions of voters have been flagged by algorithms for deletion over anomalies in their information. Millions who have appealed remain stuck in adjudication, deprived of their right to vote during close-fought elections earlier this year.
Public anger is turning into widespread protests, as evidence piles up that the exercise is disenfranchising parts of society seen as less likely to support Mr. Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist party. India’s 200 million Muslims appear to have been disproportionately targeted. Protesters are calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the chief of the election commission, a body that was long held in high regard for running relatively fair polls.
“The heart of our democracy, which is the right to vote, is at great peril,” Rohinton Nariman, a former solicitor general of India and a supreme court judge, said in a lecture last week. The exercise, which began last summer in one state before being expanded to every voter in the country, has struck the biggest blow to election integrity in India’s more than seven decades as a republic, former Indian polling officials and analysts say.
“The entire approach has changed from making the rolls inclusive,” Ashok Lavasa, a former election commissioner, said. “The effort, and the priority, seems to be getting rid of people on the slightest pretext.” While previous revisions focused on physical verification, the current process puts the onus of proof entirely on citizens. That leaves a large section of the electorate at the mercy of algorithms and mistakes in old records, analysts say.
Source: New York Times Top Stories · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing