India’s supreme court demands answers over changes to voter roll

India’s supreme court has demanded accountability from the government and the senior election body over a controversial exercise that has led to the deletion of tens of millions of voters from the electoral roll and prompted mass protests.

Demonstrations have erupted across the country in recent days as opposition parties, student groups and the youth-led Cockroach movement have demanded the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the head of the Election Commission of India (ECI).

They have accused Kumar of overseeing a direct attack on India’s democracy through an exercise to verify and “purify” the electoral roll in states across the country, which so far has led to 130 million names being removed. In Delhi, hundreds of people were detained as they tried to protest over the weekend.

On Monday, the supreme court issued notices to Narendra Modi’s government, the ECI and Kumar to demand answers over concerns raised about the voter list revision, saying they expected all “to respond in a clear, transparent manner”.

The ECI has claimed the exercise is simply cleaning electoral rolls of duplicate, dead and ineligible names, as well as removing “illegal infiltrators”. However, large numbers of people in Delhi and states such as Bihar and West Bengal say they have been wrongly stripped of their vote and have struggled to get it back.

There are accusations that revision of the electoral rolls particularly targets minorities such as Muslims, who are traditionally not voters of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP).

The opposition alliance, led by the Congress party, have accused the ECI of being hand in glove with the government over alleged vote “chori” or cheating. Kumar was chosen to head the ECI by a panel headed by Modi.

While the exercise, known as the special intensive revision (SIR), began last year, widespread outrage only recently erupted after a report in the Indian Express newspaper revealed multiple irregularities in the process, which were flagged in more than a dozen internal objections.

The two petitions taken up by the supreme court on Monday alleged that the credibility of the ECI was now in question and called for an independent inquiry into the decisions taken by Kumar in how the SIR process was conducted.

“Deletions of voters have been made in the largest democracy,” said Menaka Guruswamy, a lawyer acting for one of the petitioners. “We have grown up with free and fair elections, that is not the case now.”

Another advocate told the supreme court judges that if action was not taken to ensure that India’s electoral rolls remained fair, “this country will burn”. Another hearing in the cases will be held next week.

The controversies over the ECI have once again driven India’s young people on to the streets in protest, amid rising frustration at the Modi government.

The Cockroach Janata party (CJP), which led massive unrest over the summer that forced the resignation of Modi’s education minister, have once again mobilised and called for the resignation of Kumar. Thousands of CJP supporters took to the streets of Mumbai last Friday in protest and another demonstration was held on Saturday in Delhi.

In Delhi, police have been criticised for their heavy-handed approach to stopping any student groups protesting in the heart of the capital. Officers have been accused of sexually assaulting three journalists at the protests over the weekend and hundreds of young people were forced on to police buses. Delhi police said it was investigating the assault claims.