India's Election Commission in crisis after electoral roll purge

India proudly calls itself the world's largest democracy. Election workers can climb over high mountains and through a tangled jungle just to cast a voter. "No voter must be forgotten" is the motto.

But now confidence in the Electoral Commission, the authority that is supposed to ensure that elections are fair, is shaking. An overhaul of the electoral roll to remove people who have died or are registered twice has left out millions of eligible voters. Political analysts estimate that there are at least 130 million who are no longer allowed to vote, according to local media. Of those, tens of millions, exactly how many are unclear, are believed to have been mistakenly deleted.

The outrage grew this week after the Indian Express newspaper revealed that two of the three members of the Electoral Commission had on 14 occasions raised objections to how the work to update the voter roll was being carried out. Despite the fact that a majority of the three must be behind all decisions, chairman Gyanesh Kumar is said to have ignored the others and made several extensive changes.

Now the opposition and other critics are calling for Kumar's resignation. They suspect that he has cheated on the voter list to favor Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party, the BJP. The Electoral Commission must of course be independent. But confidence in Kumar fails. He took office in 2025, two years after the government, against the advice of the court, introduced a new law that gives the ruling politicians the right to appoint members of the Electoral Commission.

Nationwide protests erupted on Friday in India against what protesters see as "vote theft". The Cockroach Janta Party protest group was back on the streets demanding Kumar's resignation. In Delhi, several hundred people were arrested after defying the police ban on demonstrating. In Bombay several thousand joined to "defend democracy".

The cockroaches, made up largely of young Indians, have become one of Modi's biggest challenges since he took office as prime minister in 2014. This summer, after weeks of protests, the fledgling movement forced India's education minister to resign.

Rahul Gandhi, leader of the main opposition party, is also on the warpath. He prepares a motion forcing Kumar to resign, calling him a "traitor".

There is no evidence that the changes in the voter register affect political outcomes. But many point to the recent state elections in West Bengal. There, Modi's BJP won for the first time in decades by a narrow margin after millions of voters were struck off the electoral rolls. Several of those who lost their right to vote appealed, and just before the election a court ruled 1.5 million people in the right: they were found to be legitimate voters. But the Electoral Commission did not re-register them.

The pressure on Kumar is now growing ever greater. So far, he has not commented on the vote-stealing allegations or the demand for his resignation.