Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has purged more than 130 million names from the country’s voting roll. (Photo by shganti777/Bigstock)
More than 130 million names have been struck from India’s electoral rolls during a sweeping voter-list revision under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For transgender people and other LGBTQ Indians, the process has raised fears of exclusion from the ballot, particularly among those who have been rejected by their families or struggle to establish their identities through official documents.
The All-India Feminist Alliance has urged the Election Commission of India to address what it describes as the erosion of women’s voting rights during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, which began in 2025.
In a July submission, the alliance said women, trans people and members of minority communities, particularly Muslims, had been removed from voter lists at disproportionately high rates relative to their share of the population.
India’s Election Commission is an independent constitutional authority responsible for overseeing elections to Parliament, state legislatures, and the offices of the president and vice president. Established in 1950, it also supervises the preparation and revision of electoral rolls, determining who is registered to vote. Its decisions carry particular weight in a country of more than a billion people, where inclusion on the electoral rolls is a prerequisite for participating in elections.
In February, The Times of India reported that 250 people registered under the “other gender” category had been removed from West Bengal state’s’s draft electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision, primarily because they were classified as “untraceable” or “absent.” Before the revision, the state’s 2025 electoral rolls listed 1,811 voters in that category.
In a landmark 2014 ruling, the Supreme Court recognized trans people as a “third gender” and upheld their right to self-identify their gender. In National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India, the court directed the central and state governments to legally recognize gender identities beyond the male-female binary and affirmed trans people’s entitlement to constitutional protections.
In June, the Bangalore Mirror reported that a survey by the My Vote, My Right coalition had found significant barriers to voter verification among trans and intersex people in Karnataka state. Of the 74 people surveyed, none could identify the polling booth where they had voted in 2002. Many said they could not access family records because they had been disowned, forced to leave home or had their documents destroyed after disclosing their gender identity. The coalition warned that the Special Intensive Revision’s verification and voter-mapping requirements failed to account for these circumstances, potentially putting eligible voters at risk of exclusion.
Under the Special Intensive Revision, voters may be asked to show that they or their parents were listed on an earlier electoral roll, often from 2002 or another year when the state last conducted an intensive revision. If officials cannot find that link, voters may have to submit additional documents to establish their eligibility. The requirements depend on when a person was born: some must provide records for themselves and a parent, while younger voters may need records for both parents. For trans people who have been rejected by their families or cannot access old family documents, finding these records can be particularly difficult.
A separate investigation by the Indian Express uncovered a legal dispute within the Election Commission over the Special Intensive Revision process.
In July, the newspaper reported that the commission had added a new question to Form 6, which people use to register as voters. The question asked whether the applicant, their parents or their grandparents appeared on an earlier electoral roll. Although the question was labelled optional, applicants could not submit the online form without answering it.
The newspaper later reported that two of the three election commissioners had objected to the change, arguing that the commission could not alter a form prescribed by law without following the required legal procedure. Under the Representation of the People Act, 1950, changes to the rules governing voter registration must be made by the central government through the prescribed process. The controversy therefore went beyond whether the question was difficult to answer: it concerned whether the commission had the legal authority to introduce it in this way.
On Oct. 5, the chief justice said the Supreme Court had not approved the changes and that the court would examine the issue after receiving a report from the commission. The court had not yet ruled that the change was unconstitutional.
By October, the controversy had spilled onto the streets.
The Cockroach Janata Party, a youth-led movement, joined opposition parties in demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision. The protests intensified after the Indian Express reported that two of the three election commissioners had repeatedly objected to decisions related to the exercise, including the change to Form 6.
On Oct. 6, opposition lawmakers from 19 parties marched towards the Election Commission’s office in New Delhi but were stopped by police. Thousands of demonstrators also took to the streets in Delhi and Mumbai, calling for action over the removal of more than 130 million names from electoral rolls during the revision. The Election Commission has denied wrongdoing, saying the exercise is intended to remove ineligible entries and update voter lists.
On Oct. 10, the authorities mounted an extraordinary security operation to prevent a protest against the Election Commission from taking place in New Delhi.
According to the Indian Express, at least 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed, entry and exit gates at 45 metro stations were closed, and at least 245 trains scheduled to arrive at or depart from New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin railway stations were cancelled. Mobile internet services were suspended across parts of central Delhi, barricades were erected on roads and at the capital’s borders, and police checked vehicles for people suspected of travelling to join the demonstration. Authorities also restricted access to the protest site at Jantar Mantar and detained protesters across the city.
The crackdown reached the movement’s leadership before they could leave the airport. Police boarded an Air India flight shortly after it landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport and detained Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke and co-convenors Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka. They were taken to separate locations. Other people detained included opposition figures, the party’s legal team head, and journalist Dhruv Rathee. The scale of the restrictions drew scrutiny from the Supreme Court, which directed authorities not to completely halt metro and rail services. The Delhi Metro later told the court that trains had continued running, although entry and exit were restricted at 45 stations.
The difficulties extend beyond West Bengal and Karnataka states.
In Jharkhand state, a community registration drive enrolled around 60 to 70 trans people, but approximately 50 had voter records listing a trans community leader as their guardian rather than their biological parents. Scroll reported that community members feared their registrations could be jeopardised by Special Intensive Revision’s reliance on older electoral and family records. In Maharashtra, trans voters have also reported being marked absent during verification and facing demands for documents linking them to their birth families.
Tamil Nadu state presents a measurable decline: Election Commission data cited by the New Indian Express showed third-gender registrations falling from 9,464 before Special Intensive Revision to 7,617 afterward — a reduction of 1,847. The All-India Feminist Alliance has separately warned that trans people and other marginalized groups were being removed at disproportionately high rates during earlier phases of the revision, and urged the commission to provide alternative ways to establish eligibility for those unable to access family records.
Ankit Bhuptani, an LGBTQ activist, noted to the Washington Blade that the Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA judgment helped trans people secure legal recognition of their gender identity, including in electoral records. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, subsequently established a process for obtaining a certificate of identity. But Bhuptani said the certificate is not explicitly listed among the 12 documents accepted under the Special Intensive Revision process, while a 2026 amendment has made obtaining it more difficult.
Each requirement is administered through a different government office, he said, leaving trans voters caught between systems that do not necessarily recognize the same documents.
“My suggestion is that let the documents the State itself issued to transgender persons count before the Election Commission,” said Bhuptani. “Picture a trans woman who was kicked out of her biological family home in a small town at 16 because of her trans identity and has lived and worked in Mumbai for 20 years. She has a voter card, pays her bills and voted in 2024. Now she is asked to link herself to her father’s entry in an old roll, the same father who was not spoken to her since. A process meant to clean the rolls should not punish people for the family they lost.”
Bhuptani said the absence of disaggregated data made it difficult to identify errors before election day, when restoring a voter’s registration could be too late. He called on the Election Commission to include a third-gender category in deletion reports and break the figures down by reason, including deaths, relocation, duplicate entries, absence and document-related problems. He also urged the commission to establish a toll-free helpline staffed by people trained in gender identity, waive fees for appeals and set a deadline for restoring wrongly deleted registrations well before the next election.
Publishing the total number of deletions would not be enough, Bhuptani said; the commission needed to disclose the reasons behind them. If many trans voters were classified as having moved or being absent, that could indicate problems with address verification or the delivery of notices. If deletions were attributed to document mismatches, it could point to problems with the way identity records were matched. Publishing these figures state by state, he argued, would help identify where the process was failing without requiring an independent inquiry.
The National LGBT Media Association represents 13 legacy publications in major markets across the country with a collective readership of more than 400K in print and more than 1 million + online. Learn more here: NationalLGBTMediaAssociation.com.
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