After a definitely hot summer in terms of mass protests in India, triggered then by the scandal of leaked state exams and chronic youth joblessness, the fall seems not to be outdone. India is in rebellion, according to Indian academic and political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who wrote: “At stake is the very future of the country’s democracy and the potential of its renewal. The mass protests that have unfolded in New Delhi since July and flared again in October are nothing less than a contest over the foundations of the Indian state and whether it lives up to its constitutional commitments”. According to Yogendra Yadav, an activist and political scientist who has actively taken part in the demonstrations, “the nation has suddenly found its voice”. He claims that while this is not the beginning of the end of the Modi regime, it is definitely the beginning of a downward spiral.
While the first protests started in September, it was in October that they gained momentum again in the capital. For many consecutive days, tens of thousands of people gathered in the center of Delhi to march towards the Supreme Court: a variegated crowd of “cockroaches” (a satirical profile that has turned into a massive grassroots youth-led movement), student unions, leftist, and opposition parties headed by Rahul Gandhi, united against the government presided by Narendra Modi. In yet another display of power, New Delhi was massively militarized with thousands of security personnel deployed, closed subways, internet suspended, barricades and checkpoints at every crossroad. Human Rights Watch accused the authorities of having used abusive methods to crack down on peaceful protesters while also harassed and arbitrarily detained journalists and activists. A group of United Nations human rights experts issued a joint statement expressing grave concerns for the situation in India and called on the authorities to “respect, protect and fulfil the right to peacefully protest.”
This time around, the protests in the capital (and in other cities) were demanding the resignation of Election Commission chief Gyanesh Kumar over a controversial voter roll revision that has wiped out an electorate larger than the population of Japan and is being called the “largest mass disenfranchisement in history.” Activists and opposition parties say the revision has greatly favored the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by helping it win several recent state elections including in the Eastern state of West Bengal, a crucial state in India’s electoral geography, where after years of trying Modi’s Hindu nationalist party finally managed to form a government, sweeping out the long undisputed rule of the Trinamool Congress of Mamata Banerjee.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls piloted in Bihar in June 2025 and later extended to other states was intended to update national electoral rolls. Reports on the revisions stated that more than 71 per cent of the names deleted had been classified either as “absent, shifted or others.” We are talking about over 130 million names that were cancelled during the revision and disenfranchised from their voting right according to an estimate by Yogendra Yadav, a prominent elections specialist and critic of Prime Minister Modi. Long before it became an issue, Yadav launched a scathing attack on the Election Commission of India’s SIR, calling it an “unprecedented assault on voting rights” and asserting that a “crude instrument of indiscriminate mass disenfranchisement has now been refined into a precision weapon for targeted exclusion.”
Opposition parties rushed to criticize the move, describing it as “vote chori” (theft) and alleging that eligible voters had been excluded from the final list. Previously, the Election Commission of India bore the responsibility of keeping clean rolls through inclusive door-to-door verification. The current SIR process shifted the entire burden onto the citizen to prove eligibility. The removal of over 130 million names from the country’s electoral rolls “was arbitrary and deeply flawed,” said Human Rights Watch who has interviewed dozens of people arbitrarily deleted from the rolls. Critics also say the process lacked transparency and accountability while activists and lawyers denounce that many citizens are now stuck in administrative limbo trying to prove their existence.
“This is the first time the Election Commission scrapped the rolls entirely and started them new—so everyone had to prove their eligibility. Shifting the burden onto voters means the onus is on them to show documents to prove their eligibility to vote. This process of verification was difficult, opaque, and arbitrary—the rules kept changing. The documentation requirements are onerous—access to government documents in India often depends on class, gender and caste”, explains to Reset DOC Elaine Pearson, Asia Director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), “it disproportionately affects women, Dalits, indigenous communities (Adivasis) and Muslims—for instance, in one constituency of West Bengal over 92 per cent of those who were deleted were Muslims even though Muslims were only 9 per cent of the population. For those unable to confirm their eligibility, it has an immediate effect—they can’t vote, but they also lose access to social services. The authorities use the SIR data to deny government services like passport renewals, social security benefits, scholarships and residence certificates.”
The massive scale and execution of the SIR process is also a violation of India’s international obligations, according to Pearson. “India is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and as such citizens have the right to vote and access public services without discrimination or unreasonable restrictions. The SIR process has not been reasonable or proportionate, it has put unnecessary procedural burdens on millions of people and could lead to mass disenfranchisement. India really needs to ensure those wrongfully removed regain their voting rights and that people don’t lose eligibility to social security and other programs”, she said. “If they don’t fix this, it poses serious questions about whether future elections in India will be free and fair.”
The Election Commission, which was in charge of the rolls update, as well as the BJP, have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and assured that the revision was solely intended to remove duplicate, deceased and otherwise ineligible names while asserting that the party’s recent wins have come exclusively from Modi’s popularity and economic growth records. But the massive protests that brought together side by side on the streets people from diverse backgrounds, generations and walks of life—student unions, women’s groups, secular platforms, regional parties across ideological lines and trade unions under the umbrella platform “People Against SIR”—are also reflecting something larger: a growing and widespread anger towards the government.
Again, the gen Z movement a.k.a. the “cockroaches” is among the driving forces behind this wave of anti-SIR (but also anti-government) protests which have caught headlines around the world with images of police brutality and mass arrests. The grassroots movement has grown so big that it became the most significant challenge to Modi’s authority since he came to power in 2014. While the immediate goal of the protesters remains the resignation of Kumar and the restoration of electoral integrity, it increasingly seems that that sidelining the head of the Election Commission is merely a step toward the ultimate goal of opposition parties, student collectives and activists: defending the Constitution but also pushing to topple the government.
PB Mehta wrote on Foreign Affairs that “India remains a deeply unequal society in which money, kinship, and power distort almost all institutions. In this context, elections and exams are the only two processes that make the state’s promise of equal treatment tangible […] Over the last year, however, the actions of the Indian government have cast doubt on elections and exams.” The leaked-exams protests in July and the anti-SIR protests now, in a way, mirror the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests as a broad, transversal mobilization of civil society, student groups and opposition parties. When it comes to the defense of India’s constitutional pillars, Indians come together and find their voice to show the ruler (and the world) that every street, every neighborhood, can become a protest site. And they do not fear batons either.
Cover photo: Police personnel detain a supporter of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) during a protest demanding the resignation of India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged voter roll irregularities linked to the “special intensive revision” (SIR), in Mumbai on October 10, 2026. (Photo by Indranil MUKHERJEE / AFP)
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