Barely 0.012% of Bihar voters are ‘foreigners’, most are Nepali women married to Indian men

The spectre of foreign voters has loomed large over Bihar’s upcoming polls.

In June 2025, the Election Commission of India launched the Special Intensive Revision to verify nearly 80 million voters in the state, citing concerns over “illegal immigrants” on electoral rolls. A month later, officials claimed that they had identified a “large number of people” from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar during the door-to-door verification process for the revision.

The Bharatiya Janata Party amplified this rhetoric in its election campaign. At a rally on November 3, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the audience: “Mujhe bataaiye, kya Bihar ka bhavishya aap tay karenge, ki ghuspetiya tay karega – tell me, will you decide the future of Bihar, or will ‘foreign infiltrators’.”

During a recent speech, Home Minister Amit Shah referred to so-called foreign infiltrators too: he claimed that the SIR had successfully removed them from Bihar’s electoral rolls. Other BJP leaders have alluded to who they think these infiltrators are: Muslim voters that they have sought to cast as undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh.

So far, the election commission had withheld any formal tally of the foreign nationals it identified through the intensive revision. But our reporting suggests that they make up a tiny sliver of Bihar’s vast electorate.

We analysed the final electoral rolls the election commission published on 30...

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