The Names They Struck Off
India
is deleting its citizens from democracy, and Aotearoa has just signed on as a
partner
Oct 10, 2026
Nabijan Mondal had voted in every Indian
election for half a century when, in April 2026, she went looking for her name
on the revised electoral roll of West Bengal and found that it was gone. Her
husband was still on the roll for the village of Gobindapur in North 24
Parganas, and so were her three sons, her daughter and their spouses, which
meant that the only name the state had removed from the household was hers. For
decades she had been Nabijan on her voter card and Nabirul on her Aadhaar card
and her ration card, a difference no official had cared about through fifty
years of polling days, until a system built to hunt for mismatches between old
and new records decided that the difference made her a doubtful citizen. She
told Al
Jazeera that she had not understood much of what was happening to her and
had never imagined that carrying two versions of her own name could cost her
the vote, and that she would now watch her whole family vote without her.
In Murshidabad, Sohidul Islam attended two
hearings, carried every document the officials asked him to produce, and was
struck off anyway. The sentence he gave the same reporter deserves to be read
into the record of every parliament that now calls India a partner in
democracy: "If you dig this land, you can find our umbilical cords
here." Sohidul Islam is Muslim, as are a disproportionate share of the
tens of millions of people India has removed from its electoral rolls over the
past fifteen months, and his sentence answers an accusation of foreignness that
no official ever needed to say out loud, because the machinery that removed him
had already said it in the language of data.
The exercise carries a bureaucratic name,
the Special Intensive Revision, and a bureaucratic rationale about clearing
dead, duplicate and departed voters from the lists, and both have helped it
travel through foreign capitals as a matter of administrative housekeeping. It
began in Bihar in June 2025, months before a state election, and by the time
the final roll appeared that September the state's electorate had fallen
by about 4.7 million people. The Election Commission then carried the
revision across the country, and on 1 May 2026 three United Nations Special
Rapporteurs wrote
to the Government of India that roughly 52 million names had been removed
across the twelve states and union territories of the second phase alone, 9.1
million of them in West Bengal, a state the Bharatiya Janata Party had never
won and went on to win for the first time in May. The Commission's own data, Associated
Press reported this week, indicate that some regional rolls could shrink by
as much as thirty per cent.
The pattern of removal follows the politics
that announced it well before the first notice went out. Senior BJP leaders in
West Bengal promised
before the revision began that around 12 million "infiltrators"
would be taken off the rolls, and the party has spent years attaching the label
of Bangladeshi infiltrator to Indian citizens who happen to be Muslim and speak
Bengali. CARE's mapping
of Hindutva hate against Bengalis traced how the Hindutva ecosystem online
collapses Bengali into Bangladeshi, so that the language, its script and its
appearance on an identity card become evidence of foreignness in themselves. In
Nandigram, the constituency contested by Suvendu Adhikari, who now governs the
state, the SABAR Institute in Kolkata found
that Muslims made up about a quarter of the population and more than 95 per
cent of the names deleted, a finding the UN rapporteurs repeated in their
letter to New Delhi. The Election Commission has never published a breakdown of
deletions by religion, which leaves reporters, independent researchers and
United Nations experts to assemble the picture that the institution responsible
for the franchise has chosen to keep from the public.
The machinery behind these numbers explains
how a political promise became a clerical procedure. The Commission's software,
called ERONET and folded in January 2026 into a larger platform named ECINET, tries
to match every living voter with a relative on rolls compiled in 2002 and
2003, many of them kept in Bengali, Telugu, Kannada or Marathi and digitised by
character recognition systems whose accuracy the Commission has never
disclosed. Every misread letter becomes a flag the officials call a
"logical discrepancy", so that Qamer Fatima in Hyderabad received a
notice because an old entry spelled her name Qemar, and Joan Fathima in
Bengaluru received one because the system calculated that she was less than
fifteen years younger than her father when the true gap was 27 years. The UN
rapporteurs named "the opacity of the algorithmic methodology
employed" among the conditions that may amount to an unreasonable
restriction on the right to vote under the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights, and a voters' rights campaign reported
that the Commission, asked under the Right to Information Act what a logical
discrepancy actually is, replied that it held no information on the question.
The Election Commission has handed the power to doubt the citizenship of
millions to a machine that cannot explain its own rules, and the people the
machine doubts are disproportionately Muslim, female, poor, migrant and old.
Once a name leaves the roll in West Bengal,
the consequences follow the person who carried it into the kitchen and then out
toward the border. Within weeks of taking office, the new BJP government in
West Bengal ordered
on 4 June 2026 that the ration cards of people removed under the revision
be marked inactive in a food system serving nearly 90 million people, and
declared those removed ineligible for the state's monthly cash transfer for
women. Imtiyaz Ahmed, a government school employee in Hooghly who had worked as
an election officer for decades, lost his vote and was then handed a form
thirteen pages long to complete if his family wanted to keep its subsidised
grain. He described the sequence with a clarity no policy document has matched:
"First they removed our names from the voter list. Now ration cards.
Slowly, they will take everything away from us." The economist Jean Drèze,
speaking to the same reporter, called the revision clumsy, unreliable and
authoritarian, and warned that carrying its errors into the food system would
rub salt into wounds the state had already opened.
The chain that begins with a mismatched
name ends at the fence along the Bangladesh border, and the people pushed
toward it are overwhelmingly Muslims who speak Bengali. Human
Rights Watch reported in June that Adhikari claimed his policy of
"detect, delete and deport" had forced nearly 5,000 people "to
go back", and that Border Guard Bangladesh had blocked 21 attempts in the
first half of that month alone to push more than 200 people, children among
them, through the wire. Witnesses described Indian troops bringing families to
cuts in the fence at night, and one group spent 75 hours in the strip of land
between two armed forces, exposed to lightning and heavy rain, before the
Indian side took them back. A family from Siliguri held Aadhaar cards and its
oldest member had voted in four elections, and after the family's names
disappeared from the roll the police detained them and handed them to border
security for expulsion, which ended in three days stranded at the frontier
before India allowed them home. An activist working in the border districts
told Human Rights Watch that exclusion from the roll had become a trigger for
arrest, detention and expulsion, and a source of pervasive fear.
The institution that set this chain in
motion is now divided against itself in full public view. In September The
Indian Express reported that two of India's three election commissioners,
Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally
objected at least fourteen times over ten months to decisions on the
addition, deletion and restoration of names, to the gradual centralisation of
the roll database, and to a change in the voter registration form that Sandhu
called unauthorised and illegal, with several decisions taken, they said,
without their knowledge. The Commission answered that every decision of the
full body had been unanimous and described the objections as differing views
and deliberations, and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar remains
in office as protests demanding his removal spread from city to city. Kumar
was appointed under a 2023
law that removed the Chief Justice of India from the panel selecting
election commissioners, so the official who now decides which Indians may vote
was chosen by a committee the government of the day controls.
Young Indians recognised the shape of this
theft earlier than most foreign governments did, because they had already
watched the state sell off their futures through leaked examination papers. The
Cockroach Janta Party began as an online joke in May 2026, a reply to a remark
attributed to the Chief Justice of India likening unemployed young people
and social media activists to cockroaches, and within ten weeks its supporters
had occupied Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, absorbed
batons, tear gas and a mobile internet shutdown, and forced the education
minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, to
resign over the leaks that had wrecked the national entrance examinations.
Republic TV spent the week before his resignation recasting the protest as a
foreign conspiracy run by the CIA, evangelical money and a Swedish climate
activist, and CARE's analysis
of 58,941 words of that coverage found the students almost entirely absent
from a story that was supposedly about them, even as the students' own channels
reached an estimated 22 million people. The same movement gave
Gyanesh Kumar 48 hours to resign in late September, and Associated Press
now reports that it is helping lead the protests over the voter rolls across
the country.
The roll now places an obstacle in front of
this generation at the very moment it reaches voting age. The Indian Express
investigation found that the online version of Form
6, which every Indian turning eighteen must complete to register, now
carries a mandatory declaration asking whether the applicant, a parent or a
grandparent appeared on the roll of the previous intensive revision, which in
most states took place in 2002 or 2003, before most of today's applicants were
born or old enough to vote. A young woman whose parents migrated for work,
whose grandmother's name was spelled two ways by two clerks, or whose family
was struck off this year must now prove her place in the electorate through a
paper trail the state itself failed to keep, and the former Chief Election
Commissioner O. P. Rawat has called the change absolutely wrong and illegal.
The generation that brought down an education minister is now being asked to
enter democracy carrying its grandparents' papers, and the young Muslims among
them face the deletion notice, the hate speech and the charge of terror
together, a combination made plain by the continued imprisonment of the former
student leader Umar Khalid, denied
bail in January after more than five years in jail without trial.
On 20 October, ten days from now, the free
trade agreement between New Zealand and India comes
into force. Parliament passed the enabling legislation 93
votes to 29 in September with National, ACT and Labour in favour, after a
debate consumed by dairy, migration and a pledge to promote US$20 billion of
New Zealand investment in India that had almost nothing to say about the
disenfranchisement of millions of Indian citizens. The agreement carries a
chapter on trade and sustainable development and the Treaty of Waitangi
exception found in every New Zealand trade agreement since 2001, and it contains
no provision on human rights, democratic governance or the protection of
minorities. When Narendra Modi came to Auckland in July, the two prime
ministers grounded a new Strategic Partnership in their "shared
democratic values", ten weeks after United Nations experts had written
to New Delhi about the mass removal of Muslims from the rolls, and Christopher
Luxon, asked by The
Post whether Hindutva concerned him, answered no and confirmed he would
attend the community reception for Modi at Spark Arena.
The partnership reaches well beyond
kiwifruit quotas and tariff schedules, because the Roadmap to 2030 signed in
Auckland establishes a joint working group on counterterrorism for sharing
information, commits the two governments to work toward an arrangement between
India's National Investigation Agency and New Zealand Police, and pledges to
dismantle "terror infrastructure, including online". In India the
category of terror has stretched far enough to hold student leaders without
trial for half a decade, and the label of "anti-national" already
travels through diaspora networks into Aotearoa, where Muslim, Sikh, Christian,
Dalit and Kashmiri New Zealanders who speak about India report
surveillance and intimidation. When CARE published research on Hindutva in
2021, the campaign that followed included complaints to the university and the
involvement of Indian diplomatic representatives, and a security
partnership built without human rights conditions risks giving campaigns of
that kind a formal channel into the work of New Zealand's own police.
New Zealand has no power over India's
electoral rolls and full power over every instrument it has just signed. The
agreement provides for a general review one year after it enters into force,
and the government can use that review to seek an annex on human rights and
democratic governance, after publishing an independent assessment of the
agreement's human rights effects that takes evidence from the diaspora
communities most exposed. It can refuse information and assistance in any case
brought under India's terror laws against journalists, students, protesters and
religious minorities, and publish the test it applies so that the public can
hold it to that test. It can bar public money, university partnerships and
research funding from any project that profiles citizenship, voter status,
religion or language, including the speech
analysis tool Maharashtra is building with IIT Bombay to pick out supposed
Bangladeshis by their accents, which the anthropologist Adil Hossain points out
can only ever detect geography, since speakers on both sides of the border
share a dialect. It can update the country information its immigration officers
rely on, so that a Bengali Muslim who arrives here after being struck off,
served a citizenship notice or marched to the fence is assessed against the
risk of statelessness India's own policies have created, and it can treat the
intimidation of diaspora critics as foreign interference, with a reporting
pathway that does not demand proof that a foreign state gave the order.
Te Tiriti o Waitangi is written into every
trade agreement Aotearoa signs, as an exception that protects the Crown's
ability to meet its obligations to Māori, and its central promise is that a
people will never be made strangers on their own land. A Crown that holds
itself to that promise at home has every reason to refuse to underwrite a
partner that is turning its own citizens into strangers on theirs through
mismatched surnames, inactive ration cards and night marches to a fence.
Sohidul Islam answered the charge of foreignness with the umbilical cords
buried in the soil of Murshidabad, and Nabijan Mondal answered it with fifty
years of votes, and neither answer counted for anything against a database that
had been taught to doubt them. The least a country that calls itself India's
democratic partner owes them is to keep their names in the record of its own
foreign policy, now that India has struck those names from the only record that
ever let them speak.