The idea of India as a state-nation (in contra-distinction to a nation-state) that is home to diverse peoples, cultures, languages and religions is being dismantled at a fiendish pace.
This second part of the P.V. Narasimha Rao Memorial Lecture 2026 at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University recently, political economist, Parakala Prabhakar emphasises that the end game of the controversial and ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by an obviously partisan Election Commission of India (ECI) is the transformation of the Indian state into rigid majoritarian rule.
Sabrangindia is publishing the second part of this lecture today
Leave alone the citizenry. Public intellectuals, media groups, and even political leaders have swallowed this propaganda. (the narrative propagated by the ECI and the present ruling dispensation that SIR is meant only to clean up voters’)
They are uninterested in casting a probing eye on this large-scale disenfranchisement. Political leaders and a large section of the media are looking at this exercise only from the electoral point of view. They are assessing only, who this disenfranchisement benefits and whose electoral chances it harms.
Therefore, many non-BJP/NDA politicians I have interacted with in the states that went to polls after the implementation of SIR felt that it was unlikely to harm their electoral prospects. Among these there are two categories: One felt that the deleted voters were not ‘their voters’. This in itself is troubling. Because these politicians did not want to bother about deletions per se, especially if their calculations show that those deleted from the rolls may have been voters but were/are not their own voters! The second category are those that understood that their own voters too were deleted, but not enough in number to harm their winning chances. For example, some told me that the deletions were about four thousand votes, but they won their last election by about eight thousand votes. And therefore, despite deletions of ‘their own voters’, their net chances of winning the election were intact. It does not matter for them if some eligible voters were disenfranchised.
Deleted voters stay in the public discourse and news cycles only until the election results are declared. Leaders who made some noise about voter deletions, the media which wrote about them suddenly fall silent once the election results are declared. Today nobody talks about the fate of 80 lakh deleted voters of Bihar, 93 lakhs disenfranchised people of Bengal, 97 lakh voters of Tamil Nadu. Because there are no elections there now, no one talks about the 2.83 crore deleted voters of Uttar Pradesh, 44 lakh deleted voters of Rajasthan, 28 lakh deleted voters of Chhattisgarh, 45 lakhs from Madhya Pradesh, 77 lakh deleted voters of Gujarat!
West Bengal presents an even more deeply troubling picture. About 28 lakh voters were not allowed to vote even though they were not pronounced ineligible. Their papers were not examined and claims not adjudicated. Yet, the ECI, the ruling dispensation, many in the political class and the media want us to believe that the Assembly election of May 2026 was legitimate. They also want us to believe that the SIR process was bona fide, only meant to weed out the “Shifted, Absent, Duplicate and Dead (SADD) voters along with infiltrators. The ECI officials still maintain with a straight face that no eligible voter would be denied of their right to vote.
Indian Polity in the wake of the SIR
One needs to look at the long-term implications of SIR for our polity. It is to these implications that I now turn.
In the wake of SIR India will have two classes of people: one with the right to vote and another without the right to vote. The ones without the right to vote will necessarily be unsure about their citizenship. That is no surprise nowadays when almost everybody’s citizenship is uncertain. Now we are told that even a passport is merely a travel document and not a proof of citizenship.
Let me undertake a thought experiment now. Imagine that none of us in this hall has a vote. Let us also imagine that all of us live together in one residential colony. To this colony where every resident is a non-voter, would any politician or a candidate in an election come to campaign? Would any politician work for us? Would they give us drinking water, a road, a school, a health centre, a power connection?
I can say for sure that a politician would not even spend a minute of their time to stop by in our colony.
We can live there but with no claims on the state for protection and care. We are beyond the state’s pale. The state has no responsibility towards us. It does not have to care for us. If at all it does, which is unlikely, it is out of its generosity and not on account of our rightful claims on it. The state is not duty bound. We do not any more belong to the political society. In other words, the political society of India will be constricted, circumcised. Those who are excluded are no longer relevant to the Republic.
Let me tell you here that so far SIR has deleted about six crore voters. At this rate, by the time the exercise is completed in the entire country, the estimated deletions would be about 16 crores. This means 160 million voters! This is not a small number. About 80% of the countries in the world have populations of 16 crores or less. SIR in other words, is excising (or eliminating) a few countries from within India and throwing them out into the wilderness.
We are so far used to a democracy where voters decided who should be in the government. But now, in the wake of SIR, we are transitioning into a new a democracy in which those who sit in the government are deciding who should be the voters.
That is the picture which is unfolding in our country today.
BJP-isation of Political Parties
SIR has yet another troubling consequence. It is not difficult to understand that every political party will address only the interests, concerns, and priorities of those who have a right to vote. Only they matter to political parties. As we have understood the drift of the SIR deletions, most of those who retain voting right are likely to be savarna (upper caste/privileged caste) Hindus, if not in the immediate present, but eventually at any rate. We need to keep in mind that the present SIR is unlikely to be the last one. Do not rule out the possibility that SIR becomes unstoppable once it is normalised in the way that it is now normalized and even accepted. There is a probability that we will regularly have such SIR exercises that would progressively eliminate the so called unwanted and impure elements from our political society. After many iterations of SIR, the polity will be fully purged of those unwanted elements.
The non-Hindus and non-savarna Hindus who might still retain their voting right will be rendered into a politically inconsequential minority. Even without the SIR the ruling party at the centre is able to have a council of ministers without a single member belonging to the Muslim and Christian minorities. In the entire history of our independent Republic, we never had a Union Council of Ministers that did not have a Muslim and a Christian representative. Even after the conclusion of the SIR, if any minorities and non-savarna Hindus still remain with franchise, they will still be made politically inconsequential by the process of Delimitation. Assam and Jammu C Kashmir showed the way on how to pack and crack the constituencies by implementing Delimitation to make such unwanted populations irrelevant in electoral contests.
If that is the situation now, imagine what would be the political significance of these sections of our society after the SIR after it is fully implemented. That is the level of Hindu majoritarian consolidation that the current ruling dispensation could mobilize behind itself. With SIR that would be the only political society that is going to remain for every political party in the country to operate in. That would mean Hindu-isation, or rather ‘savarna Hindu-isation’, of our polity. This would result in every political party ending up as a Hindu majoritarian party, some more and some less. But all of them Hindu majoritarian, nevertheless.
The die would be cast; the pitch would be set; the political turf would be transformed. Every political party if it has to be electorally successful or even stay relevant in that curated polity and transformed turf, would play like the BJP, adopt the programme of the BJP, would perhaps even be compelled to be more BJP-like than the present BJP itself.
The point I am making is: in the medium to long term, the consequences of SIR would make every political party like the BJP. In other words, every political party in the country would be BJP-ised.
Israel-isation of India
We already see religious symbols of the majority gradually creeping up to the status of quasi state symbols. Not long ago we had seen the spectacle of several Hindu religious men parade along with a symbol of monarchy, the Sengol, in our democratic Republic’s newly built Parliament House. Not long after a ten-hour marathon debate on Vande Mataram, the government had issued an order that all central government functions should have the song’s all 6 stanzas rendered in every official function. We also are witness to government schemes getting their names that clearly allude to Hindu scriptures, godheads, and epics. Renaming MNREGA to call it G-RAM-G is only the latest example.
This process is worryingly close to the political culture of Israel. The Jewish state is unapologetic about having Jewish religious symbols as its state symbols. The Star of David is on its national flag. Every political party in that country serves only Jewish interests, addresses only Jewish aspirations, heeds only to Jewish concerns and priorities. They are barely distinguishable from one another on core issues. They, in fact, work to outdo each other in championing Jewish interests as well as in displaying their indifference and antipathy to non-Jewish concerns. The state takes no obligation onto itself to the well-being of non-Jews.
The process that is now underway in India, if unchecked, will make India go the Israeli way. In other words, what we see today is a steady Israel-isation of India.
Dismantling Secular, Inclusive India
The unfolding of these two phenomena is unmistakable: BJP-isation of political parties on the one hand and Israel-isation of Indian polity on the other, both proceeding in lockstep.
This is dismantling the idea of India as a secular, plural, and federal state that pledged itself to delivering liberty, equality, justice and fraternity to its people and to foster a humane society. The idea of India embedded in our 1947 tryst with destiny and the political compact enshrined in our 1950 constitution are now in mortal danger.
The secular, plural, democratic conception of India has been the target of unrelenting assaults from a body of individuals and several other past-worshipping obscurantist platforms. They have been openly and doggedly championing an unequal social order for over a century. Their project is to seek India’s future in its past; to recover from that imaginary past a fabricated pristine glory; to turn the secular, democratic Republic into a culturally, linguistically, religiously homogenized nation. The notion of Indian civilization as a synthesis, and as a palimpsest, is abhorrent to them. Their project’s notion of India seeks to obliterate the rich diversity of cultures, languages, lifestyles, eating habits, sartorial practices, ways of worship and syncretism that the country is blessed with. A flattened India is their notion of a ‘civilizational’ state.
SIR is but one key element in a grand project that seeks to assert exclusive Hindu ownership of the Indian nation, to make that Hindu-owned nation the sole rightful resident in the territory of the Indian state – and turn it into a Hindu nation-state, a Hindu Rashtra. It seeks to redefine the country’s identity as ‘Hindu nation-state’. In that configuration ‘savarna’ is deliberately muted and made illegible for the time being for tactical reasons.
Eventually, when constraints are broken, it would be unveiled as a full-blooded, unapologetic, wall to wall ‘savarna Hindu Rashtra’. Make no mistake.
SIR as a Bloodless Political Genocide
When we became a Republic, our founding parents made it a home for everyone who lived in its territory. Membership of the Republic, or citizenship, was not predicated on religion, caste, gender, language, culture, region of residence, colour, economic status, educational qualifications and such other things. Everyone who chose India as their land of residence was a citizen and also a voter. Denominational attributes did not privilege one or the other as rightful owners of the nation. Everybody was.
Europe went through a different experience when nation states were formed. There were people who rightfully belonged and those who were others or minorities. That was the basis of the European nation-states. There were majorities and minorities. Minorities’ residence was predicated on their becoming tolerable to the majorities. European countries, and countries which adopted that model of building their nation-states, either subjugated minorities, pushed them out of their territories, or even exterminated them. Beginning from the cleansing of the Iberian Peninsula in the mid 15th century until the ethnic cleansing that Israel carries out today, history is witness to many bloody attempts to forge homogenised nations.
But in India we chose a different path. We designed our collective life in a way that the state gave room for everyone, despite their diversity, to live together and thrive.
But ideologies in India that continue to draw their inspiration from the European nation-owned state concept want our Republic too to be turned into a state, owned by one nation – the Hindu nation. In their conception of a Republic, the others needed to be assimilated to the point of obliterating their respective identities, pushed out of the territory of the nation-state, or exterminated through genocide. In the present-day India, both the pushing out and physical extermination of unassimilated minorities are politically impractical.
However, extermination of a political kind of the others is possible. Instead of exterminating the citizen, citizenship could be exterminated. SIR is the weapon forged for that kind of extermination. It exterminates citizenship of those unwanted elements by exterminating their franchise. It is clear that without franchise, citizenship is hollow, without substance. Disenfranchisement hollows out citizenship. Therefore, SIR is nothing but a bloodless political genocide. It exterminates citizenship, pushes people out of political society, and makes people stateless even as they continue to live within the borders of the Indian state. What CAA-NRC could not do, SIR is tasked to accomplish.
The idea of India as a state-nation (in contradistinction to a nation-state) that is home to diverse peoples, cultures, languages and religions is being dismantled at a fiendish pace.
Thank you for your attention.
Part one may be read here.
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SIR and the Making of a Stateless Citizen? | R. Rajagopal Speaks Out | Teesta Setalvad
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The Stolen Franchise: Why the Election Commission cannot escape accountability
Major Irregularities in 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha Polls; Vote for Democracy