Human Rights Watch: India’s voter-roll revision removed over 130 million, disproportionately excluding women and Muslims

Human Rights Watch said Thursday that India’s Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls has removed more than 130 million names through an opaque, error-prone process that disproportionately excluded women, Muslims and other marginalized groups, intensifying pressure on the Election Commission of India as the policy faces court challenges and mass protests.

The rights group’s report, published Oct. 28 and titled “India: Mass Voter Roll Exclusions Deeply Flawed,” lands amid an escalating legal and political fight. On Oct. 26, the Election Commission filed a joint affidavit in the Supreme Court defending the exercise, saying the main orders were taken unanimously by the three-member commission and rejecting allegations that Form 6, used for voter registration, had been unlawfully amended. Since early October, meanwhile, protesters have demanded that the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, be scrapped and that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar resign.

The SIR began on June 24, 2025, first in Bihar, and was later expanded in phases across India. The Election Commission, the constitutional body that maintains voter rolls and runs elections, said the exercise was meant to remove dead, duplicate or otherwise ineligible voters. Human Rights Watch and multiple news outlets have cited roughly 130 million, or 13 crore, as the working national total of deletions through October 2026.

That figure is large even in the context of India’s vast electorate. The country had about 960 million registered voters ahead of the 2024 general election. Human Rights Watch said the scale of the removals, combined with the way the revision was carried out, raised serious concerns that many eligible voters were excluded.

A central criticism is that the burden shifted from the state to individual voters. Earlier intensive revisions, including one conducted from 2002 to 2006, relied on door-to-door verification by enumerators. By contrast, the 2025-2026 process relied much more heavily on voters producing documents, tracing themselves or relatives to older rolls, and navigating a software-driven system. “The onus of maintaining a clean, updated electoral roll was always on the election commission. It was never on the elector, where he or she had to apply, and if they didn’t apply, their constitutional right would be excluded,” Ashok Lavasa, a former election commissioner, said in comments quoted by Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch said one of the clearest signs that eligible voters were wrongly deleted came from West Bengal, where about 93% of decided appeals resulted in voters being restored to the rolls. The group also said the Calcutta High Court noted that it could take years — at least 21 by one estimate — to clear the backlog of pending appeals.

The report also points to disproportionate effects on women. According to Human Rights Watch, nearly 60% of deletions in Bihar were women, and in West Bengal, women accounted for more than 60% of deleted voters in some rounds. The group, the Internet Freedom Foundation and other observers also raised concerns about the software used in the process, saying digitization and transliteration errors helped trigger “logical discrepancy” flags that disproportionately affected some Muslim and Adivasi names.

Separate reporting from several states documented bulk objection filings under Form 7, the process used to challenge entries on voter lists, including allegations that Muslim voters were targeted. The Election Commission later tightened limits on how many such objections electors could file.

Human Rights Watch said the consequences have extended well beyond elections. People whose names were deleted have reportedly faced problems obtaining or renewing passports and accessing food subsidies, cash-transfer programs, scholarships and residency certificates. In July, the Calcutta High Court directed authorities not to take coercive steps against people deleted under the SIR and ordered that subsidized food rations and official documents continue while legal challenges were pending.

The report also accuses police and security personnel of abuses against protesters and journalists covering demonstrations. “Indian authorities first stripped millions of citizens of their right to vote and are now beating and jailing them for peacefully protesting these rights violations,” Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in the report. Human Rights Watch and press reports said thousands were detained in demonstrations in Delhi and other cities.

The legal fight has produced mixed signals for both sides. In a major ruling on May 27, 2026, in litigation over the Bihar revision, the Supreme Court upheld the Election Commission’s authority to conduct the exercise while emphasizing procedural safeguards. During interim hearings in August 2025, the court also directed the commission to accept Aadhaar among the documents that could be used during the claims-and-objections stage.

Even so, the institutional dispute has deepened. The Election Commission’s affidavit says the SIR orders were adopted unanimously. But The Indian Express reported in September that two election commissioners had recorded multiple formal objections to actions allegedly taken without their concurrence, reporting that helped trigger petitions and broader public scrutiny.

For now, the revision remains in force, but under sustained challenge in the courts and on the streets. Human Rights Watch’s report adds fresh weight to claims that an exercise presented as a cleanup of electoral rolls instead excluded large numbers of eligible voters through a process that remains fiercely contested.