cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/72444887

The deletions are the result of the controversial Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). The ECI periodically revises electoral rolls to add new voters and remove the names of those who have died or permanently moved away. The last intensive revision was completed in 2003-2004. What makes the current SIR unprecedented, however, is its scale, the arbitrariness and overreach of its procedures, and the mass disenfranchisement that has followed. The exercise has disproportionately affected Muslims, women, migrants and other marginalised communities while also raising questions about the legitimacy of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) electoral victories in Bihar and West Bengal.

Both the ECI and the ruling party have defended the exercise by using the language of “purification”. In a caste society, that rhetoric is deeply troubling but also revealing. The bureaucratic procedures and technological infrastructure underpinning the exercise barely mask its intention to create two classes of citizenship in India, one endowed with political voice through the right to vote and the other reduced to what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”.

Customised apps and online forms, digitised electoral rolls and the requirement to upload scanned documents in prescribed formats are all presented as evidence of the SIR’s efficiency and objectivity. But this approach ignores the digital divide in a deeply unequal society. Technology does not operate outside relations of power.

In fact, it often serves as a mechanism of control. The category of “logical discrepancy” relies on an AI-enabled application, ERONET (Electoral Roll Officers’ Network), which compares voters’ details with older electoral rolls and flags discrepancies in names and family relationships.

The use of such centralised systems has also raised questions about who controls electoral data and how these discrepancies are assessed. Women are particularly vulnerable to these procedures. Many change their names or addresses after marriage and may lack the documents needed to establish links with older electoral records. The excessive exclusion of women demonstrates how ostensibly neutral technological procedures can reinforce existing inequalities and weaken people’s political voice.

ERROR it appears your vote has failed to have been cast, have you tried turning your citizenship off and then back on again?