There is a man in Malda who has not missed an election since 1984. He has a ration card and an Aadhaar number, and his name is listed in the previous electoral roll. But this year, he was asked to prove that he exists. That he really is a citizen.
It is worth asking why a democracy requires its own citizens to demonstrate their citizenship repeatedly, why it insists upon it, and what it reveals when the burden of proving one’s existence falls disproportionately on those who are subjected to the same questions in multiple ways.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, which is being conducted in West Bengal and other States, is described as a normal administrative activity. But it is not. At its core, the SIR runs on an assumption alien to constitutional democracy: the entire electorate is potentially fraudulent until proven innocent. This reversal of the primary assumption of civic affiliation is not a technicality. It is a calculated political intervention.
Article 326 of the Constitution guarantees universal adult franchise. All citizens aged 18 and above are entitled to vote, regardless of the papers they hold. The right guaranteed by Article 326 does not require a citizen to hold specific documents in specific formats at specific times. Citing the absence of such papers as “ineligibility” is, in effect, disenfranchisement—a process in which the state must provide hard evidence to establish that a person is not a citizen. When an administrative procedure begins to require existing voters to renew their eligibility through documentary proof they may or may not possess, it violates the spirit of Article 326.
In response to a petition, the Supreme Court declined to stay the exercise. In a subsequent ruling, the Court said it cannot allow the inclusion of some persons on the basis that their names appear in the 2002 roll. Ordinarily, the apex court’s reluctance to intervene in electoral processes may be defensible. The constitutional antecedent at stake here, however, is no ordinary one. When a structural administrative exercise poses a tangible risk of depriving citizens of their franchise, the Court’s reluctance to take cognisance functions not as judicial restraint, but as an act of ill will. essential way. The right to vote is not only political. It is the main mechanism through which citizens exercise their right to popular sovereignty. A court that fails to protect this right with the necessary rigour can be said to be negligent in a fundamental sense.
Procedural exclusion and ‘hierarchical citizenship’
The distribution of the burden of disenfranchisement is no accident; it lies at the very heart of the exercise. The victims of the SIR underway across West Bengal are predictable: daily-wage workers who move across districts in search of work; women who have changed their names after marriage but have not updated all official records; agricultural labourers with no formal proof of employment; and, most conspicuously, Bengali Muslims concentrated in districts such as Malda and Murshidabad. These are not people whose ties to the country are fragile or built overnight. Generations of these families have lived on this soil. It is not citizenship they lack, but paperwork. Yet the bureaucratic state has substituted paperwork for belonging.
This is how disenfranchisement is carried out in India’s democracy today. It does not present itself as exclusion. It arrives as procedure, as checking, as cleaning the rolls. But the outcome is the same: politically marginalised citizens lose their vote not because they are ineligible, but because the SIR is designed to make eligibility something that must be actively proven, rather than presumed.
This is the context in which the April 1 violence in Malda needs to be read. The protests did not erupt in a vacuum. The protestors were people whom the machinery of verification had repeatedly pushed aside. A narrow law-and-order lens cannot capture the real story behind the violence. When people who feel their very civic existence is under threat take to the streets, the first analytical task is not condemnation. It is comprehension. Due process can and should be used to hold individuals accountable for specific acts of violence. But in a protest of this nature, its political meaning cannot be reduced to a policing issue without due regard for the democratic rights at stake.
Criminalising actions of dissent against disenfranchisement is not only procedurally unjust, but it is also counterproductive in the long run. It recasts a structural grievance as a problem of public order. It shifts attention to the state’s response and delegitimises future civic action by already marginalised communities. This leads to a shrinking of democracy, achieved not through a single dramatic explosion, but through steadily applied institutional pressure.
There is a sociological pattern here that needs to be studied. When the state repeatedly subjects certain communities to documentary scrutiny while others are visibly spared, it shows that the administration is practising hierarchical citizenship. A nation may promise formal equality, but it can still produce substantive inequality. While the law creates all voters as equal, administrative procedures increasingly dictate that some must continually prove themselves to be equal to others. This is not neutral governance. In the long run, it transforms the relationship of targeted communities with the state, elections, and institutions that are available to them on paper. What follows is abstention, mistrust, and eventual disengagement. The injury is not limited to the individual struck off the rolls; it extends to the aggregate breadth of democratic participation.
The man in Malda who has been voting since 1984 is not an abstract political subject. He represents the democratic minimum. When the system in which he has placed his faith is unable to protect his citizenship rights, the issue is no longer just about West Bengal and its electoral rolls. It is about what the right to vote means and about how and when the state chooses to make it conditional.
Himadri Sekhar Mistri is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
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