You vote, therefore you are: The hidden consequences of electoral deletion

The recent experience of R Rajagopal, former editor of The Telegraph, should worry every Indian citizen. Rajagopal has publicly stated that the renewal of his passport was held up after police verification because his name had been deleted from the electoral roll during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). He received his renewed passport subsequently, but the fact remains: A distinguished journalist who had voted for decades suddenly found himself unable to obtain a passport because he no longer existed on the voters’ list.

When reports of large-scale deletions from electoral rolls first began to emerge, the reaction of many citizens was surprisingly indifferent. “I never voted anyway,” some remarked. “What difference does it make if my name is deleted?” Having spent years combating precisely this voter apathy through the Election Commission’s SVEEP programme, I recognised the sentiment immediately. It reflected the widespread belief that deletion from the electoral roll meant nothing more than losing an opportunity that many had never exercised.

The Rajagopal episode exposes how mistaken that assumption may be.

The Election Commission has consistently assured the Supreme Court that the SIR is confined to preparing electoral rolls and that deletion carries no consequences beyond the right to vote. The Supreme Court, too, has reiterated that deletion from the electoral roll does not determine citizenship. The developments on the ground, however, suggest that this constitutional separation is beginning to erode.

An early cautionary lesson came from Assam. The National Register of Citizens was an exercise directly concerned with citizenship. Yet even there, exclusion from the NRC did not by itself result in loss of citizenship; any such determination could follow only after due process before the Foreigners’ Tribunals. Even so, many families whose records became entangled in the NRC process found access to Aadhaar-linked services disrupted for years.

What, incidentally, are the welfare schemes? Subsidised food-grain under the public distribution system, scholarships for students, old-age, widow and disability pensions, maternity benefits, LPG subsidies, housing assistance, health insurance, direct benefit transfers and even routine banking services. The lesson was simple: Although one government database was never intended to determine rights under another, administrative consequences often travelled far beyond the original purpose of the exercise.

That possibility has now become a harsher reality.

In Bihar, the consequences of electoral deletion have been stated with brazen candour. Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary said that persons deleted from the electoral roll “will not be entitled to any government benefits, including ration and other welfare schemes,” and that “their bank passbooks will also be cancelled in due course of time.” For the first time in independent India, deletion from the electoral roll has been publicly linked with exclusion from welfare benefits and even banking services.

West Bengal has moved in a similar direction. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari declared that “no deceased person, illegal infiltrator or non-Indian individual will be allowed to avail government schemes.” Food and Supplies Minister Ashok Kirtania stated that “those whose names have been deleted through the SIR cannot avail government schemes.” Another minister added that persons deleted “are not citizens of the country or are dead… They cannot get the benefit of government schemes.”

The Election Commission had assured the Supreme Court that the constitutional wall separating the electoral roll from other civic entitlements would remain intact. It is precisely that assurance which now appears to be under threat.

Assam, though not covered by the SIR, offers a different but equally instructive example — one that reveals the political purpose that electoral roll revision can come to serve. During the recent revision of electoral rolls, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma declared publicly: “My job is to make the Miya people suffer.” He urged that Bengali-speaking Muslims be “troubled” “in any way” possible, adding: “Only if they face troubles will they leave Assam… We are saying it openly; we are not hiding it.” He also announced that four to five lakh “Miya” voters would be deleted from Assam’s electoral rolls and later explained: “I won’t be able to deport them in my lifetime. That’s why I keep pressuring them, so that they leave by themselves.” It is the language not of an administrator updating electoral rolls but of a constitutional functionary presenting electoral deletion as an instrument of exclusion.

If Bihar and West Bengal illustrate the expanding administrative consequences of electoral deletion, Assam illustrates something even more disturbing — the political purpose that, in some quarters, is now openly attached to it.

Taken together, these developments reveal a pattern that should concern every constitutional democracy. A list prepared for the limited purpose of determining who may vote is quietly beginning to influence who may receive welfare benefits, banking services and travel documents. A clerical mistake, an absent migrant worker, a missed visit by a Booth Level Officer, or the inability to produce an old document can now trigger a chain of consequences extending far beyond the polling booth.

This is no longer merely about the right to vote. It is about the citizen’s relationship with the state.

The electoral roll serves one constitutional purpose: Identifying those entitled to vote under Article 326. Welfare benefits flow from separate statutes. Banking relationships are governed by different laws. Passports are issued under an entirely different legal framework. Citizenship is determined under the Citizenship Act, not the Representation of the People Act. These legal boundaries exist to ensure that an administrative exercise designed for one objective does not become a mechanism for exclusion in entirely unrelated spheres of public life.

Once those boundaries begin to dissolve, the consequences become grave. A citizen deleted from one database may gradually discover that he has disappeared in many others.

The case of R Rajagopal is therefore not merely the story of one journalist encountering bureaucratic difficulty. It is a warning to the republic. Those who once dismissed electoral deletion with a shrug — “I never voted anyway” — now have reason to think again. Their indifference rested on the belief that only the vote was at stake. That assumption no longer appears safe.

Electoral rolls are indispensable to free and fair elections. They must never become proxies for determining a citizen’s entitlement to rights, services or benefits beyond the electoral process. The republic has always recognised a vital constitutional distinction between the right to vote and the broader rights of citizenship. That distinction now deserves to be reaffirmed — with clarity and without delay.

For, if deletion from the electoral roll is allowed to acquire consequences far beyond the franchise, the hidden cost of losing one’s name from the voters’ list may prove to be not merely the loss of a vote, but the beginning of a citizen’s gradual disappearance from official existence.

The writer is former Chief Election Commissioner of India and author of An Undocumented Wonder — The Making of the Great Indian Election