India’s voter-roll purge is coming back to haunt Modi

• By Andy Mukherjee / Bloomberg Opinion

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What began as a Gen Z agitation against corruption in India’s higher education system has quickly morphed into a much broader challenge to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. At the heart of the discontent is the potential disenfranchisement of 130 million voters dropped from draft electoral rolls.

On Sunday, the Congress Party’s Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in parliament, led a march in the national capital to press for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Thousands of demonstrators from across the country gathered at New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan in one of the biggest anti-government rallies in recent times. A day earlier, opposition groups held a symbolic public impeachment where student leader Neha Bora accused Kumar of locking out young voters by linking new registrations to ancestral records from 2002. The panel insists the overhaul merely streamlines verification.

Parallels with Europe are hard to miss. From Paris and Madrid to Belgrade, young people have taken to the streets against entrenched elites. Their grievances vary, but the premise is shared: a generation facing stalled mobility and feeling utterly ignored. In India, the six-month-old movement calls itself the Cockroach Janta Party — a name that captures how members of the country’s 400-million-strong Gen Z cohort feel they are treated by those in power.

India’s protesters started by demanding Indian Minister of Education Dharmendra Pradhan’s ouster over leaked entrance exams, forcing Modi to accept his resignation in July. Emboldened by that victory, the agitators have moved on to something far more fundamental: the ballot box. A Cabinet minister is expendable, but letting Kumar fall would cast doubt on the electoral process that underpins Modi’s political mandate.

The election watchdog said it wanted to “bring purity” to the voter rolls by weeding out those who have died, moved or are registered in more than one constituency. Indian Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah is far more direct, hailing it as the tool to “detect, delete and deport” noncitizens, such as Rohingya refugees and illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Yet the evidence of irregularities uncovered so far is incomparable to the scale of that rhetoric. Much as US President Donald Trump has made unsupported assertions about noncitizens influencing US elections, the numbers emerging from India suggest the phenomenon might be far smaller than the claims imply. An investigation by the Hindustan Times of the revision across six states shows that the project could only identify 1,600 suspected foreign nationals from a pool of about 100 million voters.

In West Bengal, one of the early states to be subjected to the overhaul before voting, Modi’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in May won a breakthrough victory. The result immediately raised questions about the purge: Women and Muslims were disproportionately removed, while some analyses found an association between heavier deletions and stronger BJP performance. However, legal challenges by the opposition and civil groups failed to stop the nationwide rollout of the exercise. In Delhi alone, 33 percent of voters were missing from the draft list.

That was when the youth stepped up and wrested control of the narrative on Instagram. Flush from forcing Pradhan’s resignation, the “cockroach movement” seized on a Sept. 23 Indian Express investigation revealing that Kumar’s colleagues on the three-member election panel had repeatedly objected to decisions being taken in their name.

While the chief commissioner has not personally responded to calls for his ouster, the poll body denied there was a rift in its ranks. It even filed an affidavit in the Indian Supreme Court to that effect, insisting that all changes to the records were carried out by authorized officers on the ground. Yet a steady stream of media reports keeps painting a grim picture of irregularities.

To defuse the buildup of public anger, the commission said it would run a concerted campaign to bring back expunged records. That might be too little, too late. Delhi Police, which reports to Shah, Modi’s No. 2, hauled protesting students into vans and beat them up. The brutality hardened youth resolve while shocking their parents, many of them part of the urban, Hindu middle class that typically votes for Modi.

The real test comes early next year in Uttar Pradesh, an impoverished northern state more populous than Brazil. Dominating Uttar Pradesh, which sends more lawmakers to parliament than any other state, is vital for the prime minister. The stakes extend well beyond the next election. The government is pursuing two changes that could tilt India’s political balance further away from the richer south and toward the poorer, more populous north: redistributing parliamentary seats according to a fresh population count and synchronizing national and state elections. Together, they could eviscerate federalism and concentrate more power in New Delhi, leaving the south anxious about its political future.

Yet there are signs of discontent even among educated voters across the BJP’s traditional strongholds. In recent regional elections in constituencies reserved for graduates and teachers, the ruling alliance won the broader tally, but experienced embarrassing losses in Varanasi, Modi’s own constituency, and Nagpur, the ideological cradle of the Hindu right.

In June, the 76-year-old prime minister broke the record for the longest continuous tenure as the head of an elected Indian government, surpassing Jawaharlal Nehru’s post-1952 run. That milestone would remain powerful political currency for the ruling party even in the post-Modi era — provided Indians continue to trust the electoral process that delivered it.

It is precisely that trust the youth movement is challenging, but with heavy social-media censorship and the constant threat of police detention, the protest risks running out of oxygen. That explains the tactical gravitation of some organizers toward Gandhi, even as others remain wary of being swallowed by an old-guard politician. The cockroach party supported Sunday’s march, but did not participate. Bora, the student leader, spoke at the rally.

It would be a supreme irony if the wrench that finally jams Modi’s formidable political machine turns out to be this uneasy alliance — an establishment dynasty pushed into battle by a swarm of self-proclaimed cockroaches throwing themselves into the gears.

Andy Mukherjee is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering industrial companies and financial services in Asia. Previously, he worked for Reuters, the Straits Times and Bloomberg News. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.