Voter disenfranchising, bulldozer operations, trampling democracy in India

The shocking assembly election results in Assam, West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry are a result of an emboldened Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Modi, which is finessing voter disenfranchisement and bulldozer operations.

Our webinar – where we heard from Anant Gupta, political correspondent of India’s Scroll.in, and Dipankar Bhattacharya, General Secretary of CPI(ML) Liberation – made three things clear: the brazenness of the SIR; the sheer audacity of disenfranchising millions – chiefly Muslims – in plain sight; and the use of bulldozers to rob minority populations of their livelihoods. All should shock us out of our complacency.

Fascism and Hindu supremacy are on the rise, led by Modi’s BJP, whose loyalties lie with US-backed Israel and the UAE. The billionaire Adani has long been a close ally of Modi. Both are complicit in the genocide in Gaza through corporate connections and Indian workers being sent to Israel. 

SIR – Special Intensive Revision

The SIR stands for Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls. It was an exercise conducted by the Election Commission of India in 12 states and union territories starting in late October 2025, ahead of the 2026 assembly elections. The Election Commission presented it as a routine housekeeping exercise to clean up voter lists by removing duplicate entries, deceased persons, and those who had moved.

Gupta’s analysis shows that, in 105 seats that the BJP won in West Bengal, the total number of voters deleted during the SIR exceeds its margin of victory.

Some 129 seats changed hands from the Trinamool to the BJP in Bengal. Not one seat went from the BJP to any other party.

In 86 of these seats, the BJP’s win margin was less than the deletions in the SIR. It had never won them before.https://t.co/4W7lJtSmFT

— Anant Gupta (@AnantGuptaAG) May 6, 2026

Gupta explained that the SIR in West Bengal required progeny mapping, meaning voters had to prove a family link to the 2002 electoral roll, which was exclusionary.

Alongside Muslims, married women, migrant workers, queer people, divorced women, and millions of young voters were systematically erased.

And on the eve of the elections, the BJP-controlled central government sent large contingents of paramilitary forces into West Bengal, where they still remain.

Incumbent complacency

The results are a wake-up call to the Trinamool Congress, which had ruled West Bengal since 2011 and whose leader, Mamata Banerjee, has been a key opponent of the BJP. The ruling party underestimated the scale of the SIR and was “delusional” enough to think it could still win, Gupta said.

Banerjee, while right in pointing out that SIR deletions were “anti-youth”, did not acknowledge their overwhelming targeting of Muslims and did not ideologically oppose them enough to mobilise people-power against it.

Bulldozer operations

The bulldozer is a symbol of fascist violence, Dipankar Bhattacharya rightly points out in the webinar. It involves both the state and a section of fascist social forces that spearhead and celebrate the violence. JCB remains the primary instrument; the British company is synonymous with home demolitions.

India has been running a systematic eviction campaign against Muslims of Bengali origin in Assam – over 100,000 people have lost their homes across 33 operations since 2021. And the BJP’s SIR-engineered victory in West Bengal has been followed by a wave of Hindu supremacist violence, with Muslim shops and places of worship demolished; statues, including those of Lenin and of Adivasi anti-colonial fighters Sidhu and Kanhu, pulled down; and opposition party offices set on fire.

Conclusion: people, not courts

The SIR is not simply a mechanism for denying citizens the right to vote. It is part of an arsenal of laws and initiatives geared towards ethnic cleansing, which have led to mass detentions and deportations of Indian Muslims.

Already, the new BJP government in West Bengal has announced that those excluded from electoral rolls will also be denied welfare benefits.

There is no institutional remedy left. The Election Commission has abandoned neutrality. The Supreme Court has failed. International courts offer little. The only path forward is for the people to unite to face the rapid escalation of fascism.

India is now staring at a crisis started by Trump – Modi’s friend – and his delusional war on Iran. With only 60 days of oil reserves, India’s import-dependent economy is facing catastrophic shortages, while Modi is currently on another foreign trip to the UAE.

In the wake of Partition, communists in Bengal succeeded in thwarting the Hindu supremacist forces through building powerful mass movements and cultural interventions. Today, the need of the hour is for the left and progressive forces to close ranks and stand with the people to resist the Modi regime’s fascist design.

Featured image via YouTube