Inside India’s electoral overhaul that removed 130mn voters Critics say ‘aggressive’ review wrongly removed eligible voters, many of them Muslim, and may have benefited PM Modi’s party

Financial times ^ | 15th October 2026

[Cronos]

“Ayesha, Mohammed, Moinnuddin, Jasmeen, Saida, Sameena, Yaseen and the list goes on,” said 60-year-old Mohammed Baba Sharfuddin, as he listed 17 family members and 13 neighbours who he said were deleted from draft voter rolls this month.

Sharfuddin’s family has lived in the same property in a Muslim area of Hyderabad in southern India since before independence from Britain in 1947. But their names were removed from the country’s voter register, with polling agents saying they had “permanently shifted” from their residence — part of a mass revision that has resulted in about 130mn people being struck from the rolls.

“We were shocked,” Sharfuddin said. “They removed an entire family from the voter list without reason. This is the world’s largest democracy. When someone removes voters, what rights do we have left?”

The “special intensive revision” (SIR), launched last year, is aimed at “purifying” India’s voter rolls of duplicates, deceased voters and those who have relocated, according to the election commission.

But critics say the revision has wrongly removed eligible voters, many of them Muslim such as Sharfuddin, and may have benefited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in a series of state polls.

“It is disenfranchisement on a scale not known in human history,” said Yogendra Yadav, an opposition activist who has brought cases to the Supreme Court challenging vote deletions. “It is not a simple revision of the voter list. It is the rewriting of the rules of who can become an elector in India. "

About 133.9 MILLION names were flagged for possible exclusion from india's electoral rolls

Government officials have rejected accusations that the revision was politically motivated. Some have also defended it as preventing voting by “infiltrators” — a pejorative term largely used to refer to Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh.

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TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Government; Politics/Elections
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[Cronos]

134 million folks - the population of France and Germany combined!

[Socon-Econ]

If voting Muslims ever become a majority anywhere, they’ll un-vote everyone else.

[Bobbyvotes]

India has 5 times bigger voters than USA. How long does it take for India to count all votes in the general election?

[PghBaldy]

What are Pakistan and Bangladesh for? India should have shipped them out of India decades ago. Surely they know is what?

[ByteMercenary]

Too bad about the removal of koranimal names ... so sad.

</sarc>

Maybe they should move back to a koranimal-majority country and get their names back on the voter list that way.