Who is an Indian and what documents establish, conclusively, that I am a citizen? The Indian Citizenship Act of 1955 does not provide a clear answer. The criteria for Indian Citizenship by birth (from and before Independence to 1987, 1987 and 2004 and post 2004) are laid down in what in legal terms is known as criteria, not specificities. So, while prior to 1987, all Indians only required to be born here, birth proof is by elimination not a document. Since registration of birth has neither been universal nor expansive, by extension this means that to prove that X is not an Indian, it is for those contesting her/his/their citizenship – the State – to provide evidence of birth outside the territory of India. Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Post 1987, the criteria is birth on Indian soil plus the requirement (criteria) provided that one parent was an Indian citizen at the time of birth. For those born post 2004, citizenship is dependent on birth plus the establishment of the fact that both of their parents are citizens of India, or either is a citizen as long as the other is not an illegal immigrant. Section 2 (1) (b) of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 1955 defines an illegal migrant as any person who has entered the country without a valid passport or travel document or having entered with a valid passport or travel document has stayed behind after its expiry.To establish any or all these, the process of identification and exclusion has to be case by case by the authorities and cannot be, in law, implemented en masse.This then is the crux of the issue.Yet the regime has decreed otherwise. Through administrative diktat, a usurpation of powers by a misguided Election Commission of India (ECI) and endorsed by an equally blindsided Supreme Court. Instead of a reasoned case by case denial or exclusion, en masse exclusion and statelessness has been unlawfully permitted.A woman with an Indian passport. Photo: PTI//Shiva Sharma.Be it the sinister yet spurious claim made by an “official” of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) recently on Passport Seva Divas (June 24) that the “Passport is not proof of Indian Citizenship” or the spate of unchecked deletions under the crassly executed and judicially approved Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in 14 states, what is clearly afoot is a regime driven effort to aggressively read an ideologically driven documentary test into a citizenship law that does not exist. Worse, efforts to steamroll through the final exclusions individually and en masse without adjudication processes being either expedited or even initiated has meant that not simply access to welfare schemes and renewal of passports is being – in co-ordination – denied. [1]This weaponisation of the law began through the CAA, 2019 amendment that was initially kept on hold because of the waves of protests and outrage. These were ultimately silenced: constitutional challenges to not just the 2019 amendments but also the hitherto untested 2003 Rules enacted under the 1955 CAA by the Atal Behari Vajpayee administration remain pending, in cold storage before the same constitutional court. [2]Also read: 23 Opposition Parties Including DMK and AAP Write Joint Letter to CJI on SIRThe present SIR process, as this writer has been stating consistently since 2025 is ‘nothing short of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and CAA, 2019 being brought in through the backdoor.’The Damocles sword of statelessness now hangs over millions of Indians. It began with Bihar and was fine-tuned or improved from this regime’s ideological stand-point in West Bengal with a ‘logical discrepancy’ categorisation allowing millions more to be disenfranchised.The Reporters Collective and The Wire analyses show – and Sabar Institute’s work in West Bengal has corroborated – technology has been (mis) used to exclude and district wise exclusions have been demographically driven. The target, the vibrant and politically active 27% of the Muslim minority in West Bengal. And it is not merely the fact that an irregular election process was allowed in both Bihar (2025) and West Bengal (2026) under the SC’s watch. [3]Where will this end?Representative image of a BLO working during the Bihar SIR exercise. Photo: X/@CEOBihar.Samrat Chaudhary, the newly installed chief minister of Bihar, made it clear: no welfare benefits would accrue to 22 lakhs persons excluded. Suvendu Adhikari, in West Bengal has followed suit. Where has Bihar’s mysterious number of 22 lakhs arrived from, however? Our analysis of the Bihar 2025 mandate reveals that this figure of 22 lakh – drawn from the recently conducted, controversial SIR exercise in the state – corresponds only to deceased voters. [4]The utter opacity if not the downright cloak of secrecy and unaccountability under which the ECI not only conducted the SIR process, but the absence of cogent and logical figures of inclusions and exclusions, stage-wise and state-wise has left independent media and citizens with an irreconcilable numbers puzzle, unacceptable when the unresolved hundreds of thousands or millions actually means names and faces of Indians. Indians who are being potentially or actually being summarily disenfranchised.Months after the Bihar results in early 2026, Vote for Democracy’s report on the Bihar polls, “An Audit of the Stolen Mandate” Bihar 2025 VFD Report Findings had recorded details of what the report termed “Mass disenfranchisement by design.” These stated that, according to official ECI data, the numerical impact of a hastily conducted SIR was staggering: the new draft role (August 1, 2025) that recorded only 7.24 crore voters, reflected a staggering 65.69 lakh deletions. Yet, the report found that only 3.66 lakh voters were actually confirmed as ineligible. The scale of deletions was therefore grossly disproportionate, pointing not to routine correction but to electoral roll engineering. There were other statistical anomalies detailed in the report, for instance how, between July 21 and 25 alone, over 21.27 lakh voters were deleted in just three days – an implausible figure by any administrative standard.Also read: SIR at One: No Figure for ‘Illegal Immigrants’, Using Roll Revision to Suspend Rights, Rules Vary for Different StatesDuring this period, 5.44 lakh voters were marked ‘dead’, while 14.24 lakh were labelled ‘permanently shifted’. The number of voters marked ‘untraceable’ rose by 809% overnight, while not a single “foreigner” was identified – despite this being cited as a key justification for the revision.Sabrangindia and Vote for Democracy’s more recent analysis of the SIR conducted in 14 states reveals a staggering unexplained discrepancy of 2.79 crore voters (20 million plus) in the total numbers: when launched, the SIR exercise began with 61.38 crore existing electors; after 5.29 crore final deletions and 1.87 crore additions through Forms 6 and 6A, the final roll should have been 57.96 crore electors.A protest against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bengaluru, Karnataka on May 30, 2026. Photo: PTI/Shailendra Bhojak.Mysteriously, the published roll shows only 55.17 crore electors, leaving an unexplained gap of 2.79 crore, not an insignificant number. With a complete absence of transparency – names and identities – of both the deleted and the new voter influx – the question we ask is this: Who are these ‘new voters’, is their registration transparent following due process, and what criteria were implemented to simply deny existing voters their right to vote? There is no clarity either on whether and how the correction processes will be transparent and carried out. So, this means that this utter en masse exclusion has potentially rendered the spectre of mass statelessness real.Finally, as the rest of India, mainland as we call ourselves are left grappling with a three pronged assault, this is not unfamiliar to hundreds of thousands of our fellow Indians in Assam. The most recent face of the Indian state that we are encountering has been felt by the people of Assam for close to three decades.In three distinct and devastating ways.First in the issuance of Declared Foreigners notice by the Assam Border Police under the Foreigner’s Order of 1946 (reaffirmed in 1964), often without any robust inquiry being conducted. According to the state’s own affidavit in the Supreme Court (2023), 97, 714 cases remained then pending in the Foreigner Tribunals (FTs). Another 1, 8, 461 cases arising out of FTs had been pending before the Gauhati high court. Second through the D-Voter exclusions executed by lower down officials of the ECI (as of December 2025) for decades – another 93, 2021 persons are denied the right to vote and often access to scheme benefits, jobs etc. Thirdly and most devastatingly by the frozen exclusions under the NRC determination exercise (1.9 million excluded from Citizenship Rights in Assam as of August 31, 2019). This means that, close to 2,109,196 people (approximately 2.1 million) reel in Assam already under the threat of permanent statelessness, their legal status frozen in time as a poor and inept adjudication process makes their access to corrective rights slow if not impossible. They are also denied schooling benefits, banking and government scheme access.This is 6.88% of the state’s population.Like the people of Bihar and West Bengal experience today, the millions excluded from the other 12 SIR-conducted states, and potentially more from all other regions where the SIR will be conducted in the same uncorrected and unchecked manner will reel under similar exclusions.Our demands therefore should be clear. The debate cannot be about correcting an inherently flawed and prejudicial process. It has to be brought around to a complete rejection. In the ongoing SIR, the central issue is not merely the exclusion of voters from electoral rolls but the broader implications such exclusions may have for citizenship, constitutional rights, and democratic participation.This SIR must go.[1] Recent instance of R Rajagopal, former editor, Telegraph, has illustrated the cold strategy of the government[2] The matter was last listed on May 5, 2026, remained simply not taken up and the next ‘computer generated’ date says it just might be listed for hearing July 24.[3] The remark by one of the SC Judges, Joymala Bagchi hearing the SIR matter on April 24 “This election, yes, perhaps they can’t vote. The more valuable right to remain on the rolls shall be preserved,” sums up the rather legally inadmissible situation.[4] Even before replacing Nitish Kumar as Chief Minister of Bihar on April 15 – Samrat Choudhary has, while campaigning for the Bharatiya Janata Party, claimed that 22-lakh people would be struck off Bihar’s electoral rolls, with their driving licences and other benefits cancelled.Teesta Setalvad is co-editor of Sabrang India and secretary of Citizens for Justice & Peace.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click.