How booth-level officers in Bihar are deleting voters arbitrarily

Jhurana Das made Bihar her home more than four decades ago. She moved to the state as a 23-year-old bride. It is where she built her life, and it is where she lost her husband to a kidney ailment last year. Now, as Jhurana approaches 70, she has to prove that she is a legitimate resident with the right to vote.

In August, a booth-level officer informed Jhurana that she may not be able to participate in the state’s upcoming polls. “I voted in the last state election,” she told us, as she sat outside her hut in Belauri, a locality on the outskirts of Purnia city in northeastern Bihar.

Jhurana’s name was missing from the draft electoral rolls that the Election Commission of India released last month after it concluded the contentious Special Intensive Revision – an exercise aimed at verifying the eligibility of nearly 80 million voters in Bihar. But her name doesn’t feature in the list of deleted voters’ that the commission published after a Supreme Court directive either. Every time we entered the Elector Photo Identity Card number assigned to her, the website threw up an error message: No Result Found.

The booth-level officer told Jhurana that she needed to procure her parents’ identity documents to...

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