Bengaluru: Over the past few days, students, youth, members of the parliament, opposition parties, lawyers and members of civil society have taken to the streets to demand accountability from the Chief Election Commissioner. These peaceful protests across cities came after news emerged of at least 13 crore voter deletions through the special intensive revision (SIR) exercises across states. Police personnel especially in Delhi have responded with barricades, lathi charges and detentions. Even journalists covering the protests have been detained over these days. While these protests are not about the environment, they are as important for it as they are for democracy, researchers and environmentalists told The Wire. There can be no environmental or climate justice without democratic protests as is evident over decades of Indian environmentalism: from the Chipko and Silent Valley protests in the 1970s in Uttarakhand and Kerala, to Niyamgiri in Odisha in 2008-09. These and several other protests have often forced governments to change course in favour of the environment and people. Stifling protests of any kind, therefore, are a huge concern, experts pointed out.Politics and environment are inseparable“Protests are fundamental to any democracy…If something is wrong people must protest,” said Stalin D., Director of Vanashakti, a Mumbai-based environmental NGO. Over the decades spent fighting for the environment, Stalin is most known for spearheading the Aarey citizen protests in Mumbai when the state government planned to divert parts of the forest for construction of a metro shed. Their fight was to declare parts of Aarey as a forest and they won it, Stalin told The Wire. The ongoing protests regarding voter deletion are crucial because those voters eliminated from the voters lists could decide the future of the country:“The power lies with the people, not the government. A few lakh votes can decide the future of this country. These 130 crore people [who have been deleted from the voter lists] are aware and intelligent enough to understand what is right and what is wrong,” he said.Whether it is for the environment, whether it is the farmers, or the women at Shaheen Bagh, protests have never been for an unjust cause, he added. Television media trying to portray nationalists as traitors worked for quite some time but it will not work anymore, he said. When a particular government is destroying the environment, and is worse than the previous one, then it is his duty to speak up, he added: “I cannot separate the two, politics and the environment.”Stalin minces no words. “The BJP must go, if India has to survive. India and BJP cannot survive together. We [Vanashakti] have fought every party but the BJP has been the worst. In the last decade they have amended so many laws, literally bulldozed their way to help their cronies or rather one particular crony, directly or indirectly,” he said.The laws that Stalin refers to include the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act in 2023, the Captive Elephant (Transfer or Transport) Rules 2024, amendments to the Wildlife (Protection) Act in 2022, and the Environment (Protection) Regulations 1986. Changes to the latter in 2025, for instance, could benefit the Adani Group as it will not need to consult with locals at Ambivli, Maharashtra, who have already raised environmental and livelihood concerns regarding a proposed cement grinding plant.Environmental justice needs transparencyWhen governments make environmental decisions, it is also about who gets to control natural resources, who participates in this, who benefits from this so-called development, and who bears the environmental costs, said researcher Sridhar A., who works on wetland conservation. “Environmental justice needs this transparency. This is where it aligns with how democratic institutions are working, how the people who are in power are using or abusing that power,” he told The Wire. “Transparency is crucial for both the democratic process and the environment. And protests that demand accountability are one way to ask for this transparency.”For instance, accountability becomes crucial in the cases of environmental clearances that the government has given to many projects and the corporate powers dictating these moves, Sridhar said.“It is currently difficult to hold them accountable because of the decreasing space for dissent. I think the major concern is who decides, because of the significant resources that corporations also bring in…it is also evident with who is funding who, such as in the electoral bonds case. With so much financial, technical and even legal resources, how corporates are dictating this is known. It is not beyond imagination. Who is benefitting and who is getting affected, that equation is now grossly in the favour of corporations. So how to challenge these decisions and address this imbalance, it is a long struggle ahead.”Accountability is crucial for climate actionOn the surface, the voter-roll protests are not “climate protests” but about accountability and mounting public anger at institutions that appear to be closing off peoples’ ability to question power, said Apekshita Varshney, Executive Director of HeatWatch, a group that works across India to build awareness, evidence and pressure for change on extreme heat.But the right of people to question power is deeply relevant to climate action, because climate policy depends on whether citizens can vote, organise, access information and hold governments and corporations to account, she told The Wire.Heatwaves, floods, droughts, air pollution, and displacement hit those hardest who have the least political power: informal workers, migrants, Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims, marginalised women, and low-income urban residents. If people are removed from electoral rolls or face opaque, burdensome processes to prove citizenship, it’s the very people most exposed to climate impacts who lose a key channel to demand protection, she added. “This is an important consideration for climate, because governments make choices every day. They decide where to expand coal, or where there should be greening initiatives in cities, who gets disaster relief, labour protections, clean transport, and who receives compensation after floods or heatwaves. A government that feels unaccountable can easily deprioritise those most affected.”A government that must answer to an informed, mobilised public is more likely to treat heat, pollution, and displacement as public emergencies rather than as problems for marginalised communities to endure alone. Ultimately, protests are important because they disperse suffering into public political pressure.“The voter-roll protests may not carry a climate banner, but they defend the very civic conditions under which climate demands can be made effectively,” Varshney said. “If people cannot reliably participate in elections, protest safely, or obtain transparent information, then even well-designed climate policies can become top-down and exclusionary.”Several examples in IndiaWe have several examples in India, including that of Hasdeo in Chhattisgarh where communities opposed coal mining through gram sabha resolutions, long marches, tree-sitting, legal action, and a broad public campaign, arguing that clearances and consent processes had been compromised. The pressure did work and in July 2022, the Chhattisgarh Assembly unanimously passed a resolution calling for cancellation of coal-block allocations in Hasdeo, and the state sought withdrawal of blocks from auction, Varshney said. Hasdeo also shows why accountability must be ongoing, she added. Mining in parts of the landscape, including the Parsa East and Kete Basan expansion, has continued or resumed despite opposition; and in 2026 the Tara coal block was again put up for auction, reigniting the conflict. So Hasdeo is not a clean “win” in the sense of permanent protection, but is powerful evidence that sustained protest can force governments to reverse course or do so at least partially, she added.“In Niyamgiri, Odisha, too, for years the Dongria Kondh and other forest-dwelling communities have opposed and stopped Vedanta’s mining in hills they regard as sacred. Ultimately, environment protection and climate action in India has often advanced not because institutions voluntarily acted, but because communities made silence and impunity impossible and free, fair elections, transparency, right to gather/protest are the very basis of that,” Varshney told The Wire.