NEW DELHI — Like many Indians, Kanchan has one name and lives in hardscrabble quarters. Her home is built of tin and a tarp, constructed under a flyover in the capital New Delhi. And like many on the margins, Kanchan was proud of her right to vote — a rare equalizer in unequal India.
"It's important, because it shows we are citizens," Kanchan said on a recent October day, sitting on a plastic chair as vehicles trundled overhead. But a few weeks ago, Kanchan said about 500 adults were deleted from their voter roll in this community, which resides around a bridge. They found out through another resident who is allowed to examine the voter rolls as a representative of a political party.
They were among an estimated 130 million names that were deleted during a revision of voter rolls that began last year in June. The number is an estimate by Yogendra Yadav, an elections specialist and prominent critic of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Nevertheless, the BJP has cited the figure as authoritative in its defense of the voter roll revision.
The rolls once had listed 980 million names. "The government is choosing the people that support them," Kanchan told NPR, accusing the BJP of engineering voter rolls to disenfranchise communities opposed to the party. That is a widespread belief among critics of the voter revision process, including a former chief election commissioner of India, SY Quraishi.
"Normally voters choose the government, here the government was choosing the voters," said Quraishi, who served in that role from 2010 to 2012. India's election commission, which is overseeing the voter revision, is ostensibly independent. But critics accuse chief commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of being partisan to Prime Minister Modi's party.
And it is the party, not the commission, that has mounted a defense of the revision. In a video issued on the BJP's YouTube channel in early October, it said those approximately 130 million deleted names were of people who had died, had duplicate entries, had moved residences or were otherwise absent. Kanchan said in her community, people were deleted on the basis they had relocated, even though an election official came to visit and she "made me sign and hand over the form to her." And activists helping Indians get back on the voter roll say many others were deleted because they could not provide information that had never been demanded of voters before, like demonstrating that their parents or grandparents voted in elections more than two decades ago.
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