Voter Purge That Came Knocking on Advani’s Door

When L.K. Advani was India’s Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, he was so punctual that journalists covering the Home Ministry hardly needed a wristwatch.

His movements could tell you the time.

He would arrive at North Block between 8.30 and 9.00 in the morning. At about 1.30 PM, he would leave for lunch, often stopping to speak to television reporters near Gate No. 3 of South Block. He would return around 3.00 PM and normally finish his official work at about 7.45 in the evening.

But before leaving, there was one final item on the Home Minister’s unofficial agenda.

He would ask his secretary, Deepak Chopra, to find out whether any journalists were still roaming the corridors. So, most of journalists covering Home Ministry would wait in the corridors to get something form horses’ mouth.

Advani would receive us, order tea, and first ask what we were hearing. Then, after collecting some information from journalists, he would occasionally offer something of his own.

Sometimes it was to be attributed to “sources.” Sometimes he would insist that even the sources should disappear and that we should simply use the information in our own reports without any attribution.

For me, however, these late-evening briefings frequently presented a professional problem. Advani was fascinated by Bangladesh and, more particularly, by Bangladeshis allegedly infiltrating India. Bangladesh did not make a byline or front-page story for Kashmir Times. For correspondents representing newspapers in Assam and other northeastern states, this was front-page material.

One evening, Advani told us that perhaps five crore Bangladeshis had entered India illegally and were living across the country. His government, he said, was looking for ways to identify them and deport them. Five crore was an impressive number. It was also sufficiently large to ensure that nobody in the room was likely to forget it. The BJP spokespersons would also later repeat this number.

More than two decades later, the Election Commission of India launched its Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of electoral rolls to erase dead, shifted, duplicate, and infiltrators from the list.

More than 13 crore names were left out at the draft stage across states and Union Territories where the revision was conducted.

The five crore alleged Bangladeshi infiltrators he spoke about more than two decades ago could, with a little demographic imagination, look like they have multiplied into today’s 13 crore missing names.

But history has a mischievous sense of humour. When the Special Intensive Revision finally set out to identify doubtful voters, its net reached L.K. Advani himself. For a while, it appeared that the great hunter of Bangladeshi infiltrators had himself fallen under suspicion. There was only one geographical problem with the joke: Advani came to India from Karachi, not Bangladesh.

One suspects he would have appreciated the irony. The system he once wanted to use to separate citizens from infiltrators had, decades later, knocked on his own door and politely asked him to prove who he was.

Behind that irony lies a far more serious question.

Delhi Rolls

In Delhi, when the latest electoral-roll revision began, my wife and I discovered that our names were missing. As far as I can remember, I had been on the electoral roll since 1998 and had voted several times. Curiously, our daughter remained on the list.

The burden was now on us to establish that we were her parents. After documents were collected and the necessary bureaucratic pilgrimage performed, my name reappeared. But the electoral machinery had another surprise waiting for me.

My father’s name had become “Manoj Gilani.” I have known my father by many descriptions. Manoj was never one of them.

Ordinarily, a citizen might shrug at such an error and postpone another encounter with Indian bureaucracy. But the electoral roll is increasingly becoming more than a record of who may vote. Questions over electoral registration can intersect with identity verification and other official procedures. That makes an apparently clerical error potentially much more consequential.

The controversy became more serious when The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had recorded objections at least 14 times over ten months to aspects of the process, including changes involving additions, deletions and access to electoral databases.

The SIR began in Bihar in June 2025 before expanding to other states.

The process subsequently expanded across much of India. In May 2026, the Commission announced Phase III covering 16 states and three Union Territories, involving more than 36 crore electors.

Golwalkar and Muslims

For decades, the politics of citizenship, migration and Muslim political representation have occupied an important place in the ideological discourse of the Hindu nationalist movement.

In a May 1965 speech to a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh training camp in Andhra Pradesh, Bhartiya Jana Sangh leader Deendayal Upadhyaya recounted a conversation between RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar and Vinoba Bhave about what they called the “Muslim problem.”

According to Upadhyaya’s account, Golwalkar spoke of the need for Muslims to be politically defeated before assimilation could take place.

When Vinoba Bhave told Golwalkar that the Sangh was hostile towards Muslims, Guruji made a statement that would later become central to the Sangh’s entire social thinking:

“We are not enemies of Muslims. There may be some good individuals among Muslims and some bad individuals among Hindus. But the point worth considering is that a Hindu may be bad as an individual, yet collectively he is naturally and inherently good. In contrast, a Muslim may be good as an individual, but collectively he is inherently bad.”

This historical conversation demonstrates that rendering Muslims politically, electorally and constitutionally ineffective and powerless is not merely an electoral compulsion of the BJP, nor is it an accidental development that began after 2014. It is a fundamental project of the Sangh Parivar going back nearly six decades, one that has been pursued through different stages over the years.

Within India’s democratic and parliamentary system, Hindu nationalists had always faced a major obstacle. Hindus themselves were divided along caste, linguistic, and regional lines, while Muslim voters tended to throw their weight behind secular or regional parties. This combination repeatedly blocked the Hindu nationalists’ path to power.

Therefore, to translate Golwalkar’s vision into political reality, Hindu nationalist politics passed through three distinct phases.

In the 1984 elections, the BJP was reduced to just two seats in Parliament.

The first task, therefore, was to provide a common religious identity to a Hindu population fragmented by caste divisions. The Babri Masjid dispute in Ayodhya was turned into an instrument for achieving this.

L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, deepened religious polarisation across northern India.

Although the BJP eventually came to power during Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure, it remained dependent on a coalition, the National Democratic Alliance, or NDA. Many of the regional parties within that alliance were themselves dependent on Muslim voters.

The Sangh had therefore completed its first phase: it had acquired political legitimacy, but ideological dominance still remained beyond its reach.

The objective of the second phase was therefore to use polarisation to secure power on its own.

Following the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, Narendra Modi’s close aide Amit Shah brought caste-divided Hindu communities in Uttar Pradesh together on a common platform against Muslims. Political observers described this as “reverse polarisation.”

Former member of Parliament and prominent journalist Shahid Siddiqui records in his autobiography a private conversation he had with Amit Shah.

When Siddiqui asked what the BJP’s policy towards Muslims would be, Shah told him bluntly that the party had no interest in Muslim votes and would perhaps think about them only after several years.

He put it in unequivocal terms:

“Elections are not won or lost on good work. They are won and lost on emotions.”

Marginalising Muslim Votes

The essence of this formula was to field several secular candidates in Muslim-majority constituencies, or in constituencies where Muslim voters exercised significant influence, thereby dividing the Muslim vote among them, while consolidating the entire non-Muslim vote behind a single BJP candidate.

In 2014, there were 87 Lok Sabha constituencies where Muslims constituted more than 20 percent of the population. The BJP won 43 of those seats.

The strategic importance of the Muslim vote had effectively been reduced to zero.

In 2019, the Pulwama attack and the Balakot airstrike allowed Pakistan and national security to become substitutes for domestic polarisation. This enabled Hindu voters to set aside internal economic and social contradictions and rally behind the BJP, helping the party secure 303 seats.

But in the 2024 general election, the limitations of this formula became apparent.

The Pakistan card could not be played indefinitely. Consequently, the election campaign became heavily focused on Muslims, “infiltrators” and claims that the wealth of Hindus would be taken away.

Despite this openly hostile rhetoric, the BJP fell from 303 seats to 240 and, after a decade, lost its single-party majority.

Observers on the ground believed that without the alleged assistance of the state machinery, particularly sections of the electoral apparatus, the party might not even have crossed the 200-seat mark.

The 2024 election therefore sent a warning to the BJP leadership: the slogan of Hindu unity could no longer guarantee a parliamentary majority every time.

It is at this point, in accordance with Golwalkar’s 1965 ideological prescription, that the third and most dangerous phase began:

When the voter’s mind cannot be turned in your favour, erase the voter himself from the electoral roll.

The most disturbing development is that removal from the electoral roll is now being linked directly to a person’s very existence and survival.

As soon as the BJP formed the government in Bengal, its minister Agnimitra Paul openly announced that people whose names had been removed from the electoral rolls during the SIR would be denied government welfare schemes, foodgrain and ration benefits.

Hindu undocumented immigrants, however, would remain entitled to apply for benefits under the Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA.

Citizens whose names have been removed from electoral rolls have also had the renewal of their passports stopped.

During police verification, the absence of a voter identity card is being treated as grounds for questioning a person’s citizenship, as happened in the case of R. Rajagopal, editor of the prominent English-language newspaper The Telegraph.

Ordinary citizens are also receiving notices from banks asking them to provide proof that their names appear on electoral rolls, failing which their accounts could be frozen.

Thus, without any formal amendment to the Constitution, a frightening hierarchy is being created within India.

On one side stands the citizen whose citizenship is considered beyond all doubt.

On the other stands the vulnerable Muslim or marginalised citizen who, at every step, is required to produce documentary proof of his loyalty and his very existence on the soil of his own country.

Now consider once again Golwalkar’s 1965 ideological proposition that the only solution to the “Muslim problem” was the complete political defeat of Muslims.

Look at India’s electoral map.

There are approximately 138 Lok Sabha constituencies in the country where Muslim voters constitute 15 percent or more of the electorate, and 87 constituencies where their share exceeds 20 percent. These seats are spread across Uttar Pradesh, Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Maharashtra and Telangana.

Under the present electoral system, it is not even necessary to remove all Muslims from the electoral rolls to alter the outcome of a constituency.

If Muslims constitute 35 percent of the electorate in a constituency, and just five or seven percent of Muslim votes are systematically removed in the name of Form 7 or a “logical discrepancy,” while the remaining Hindu vote is consolidated, the strategic electoral strength of the minority population can be reduced to ashes in the blink of an eye.

Mamata Banerjee’s defeat in Bhawanipur by 15,000 votes and Arvind Kejriwal’s defeat in New Delhi by 4,000 votes are cited as evidence of how, where the margin of victory is so narrow, the deletion of thousands or hundreds of thousands of voters can change the direction of political power.

Muslims constitute around 15 percent of India’s population, yet only 24 Muslim members were elected to the 543-member House. That amounts to just 4.4 percent of the Lok Sabha.

The ruling BJP does not have a single Muslim member of Parliament.

Completing the Circle

In 1965, Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya introduced RSS cadres at that training camp to Guru Golwalkar’s philosophy. With the emergence of the SIR, the circle of that ideological campaign has now been completed.

The first stage was to exclude Muslims from representation in legislative institutions. And the second stage now is to take away even their power to determine who will govern them.

This is not a matter of clerical errors by the Election Commission. It is a calculated and systematic project to construct a majoritarian ethnic state within the world’s largest democracy by strangling its Constitution.

If the country’s highest court, its independent institutions and vigilant citizens do not stand up against this digital and electoral exclusion, India’s Muslims may perhaps continue to be described as citizens in the formal terminology of law. But in reality, in their own homeland, they will be reduced to a powerless population deprived of their vote, dignity and very existence, relegated to the status of second-class citizens.

And this was precisely the grim destination that M.S. Golwalkar had pointed towards at that training camp in 1965.