The third phase of the 2025-26 special intensive review (SIR) of the Indian electorate has taken our country to the end of the trail of destruction that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has carved through India’s democratic system. The massive disfranchisement it has wrought on vast sections of the Indian electorate, has left no room for doubt about the SIR’s real purpose. From the very beginning, it was to find a legally acceptable way of disenfranchising a large section of the poor, the unemployed, and minorities, who are now the most disillusioned sections of the electorate. This is in order to ensure a permanent majority for the Bharatiya Janata Party and its mittelstand supporters in the country. The results of the almost complete SIR show that the Election Commission has and found a way to do so. The first question that the above results raise is when the electorate in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections for all states, minus Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh (1.4 crore in 2024) was 96.5 crore, by what sleight of hand has the SIR made it shrink to 84 crore voters in a single year. The disfranchisement of 11.81 crores indicates that one in every eight Indians who, according to the earlier lists had been entitled to vote, cannot.Who are the victims?The pattern of deletions revealed by phases one to three of the SIR, and particularly by phase three, which contains all but a few of the largest and fastest growing cities in the country, confirms that the main victims have been migrant workers who have moved to the cities in search of work. This is revealed by the pattern of deletions: Against the average 12.18% deletion of the electorate of the whole of India, the deletions in the major cities have averaged between a quarter and a third of their entire electorate. Here is a list of deletions in some of India’s largest cities:National Capital Territory of Delhi: 33%,Mumbai (city and suburban): ~35%,Chennai: 35%,Eleven assembly seats in Kolkata North: ~26% There are in all 21 cities with populations adding up to more than 60 crores, that have sizeable numbers of migrant workers. Closely related to these and more cities which have over 10 crore populations are lakhs of satellite townships that have grown up around them. All of these contain migrant workers from other states, of whom a large proportion were unwilling or unable to leave their places of work for the days it would take to return home and find or acquire fresh copies of at least one of the required documents, in order to re-establish their right to vote. The same must have been true of many of the migrant workers who found work within their home states. The 2011 census had estimated that there were 39.6 crore intra-state migrant workers. Since there was no census in 2021, it is not possible to estimate by how much this figure has grown. The sheer numbers cited above force us to consider whether all but a fraction of the deletions in the 2025-26 SIR have taken place from among migrant workers, especially those who have gained relatively secure jobs in other states and have been unwilling to risk losing them. In the 2004 enumerations of the electorate, these had been difficult to keep track of manually. But the numbers were small, and already that problem had begun to be solved when election-related data and their storage was fully computerised in 1998.From then till the Lok Sabha elections of 2024, the changes in the electorate recorded by the officers of the Election Commission have been updated digitally before every election. Since the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha elections are held at different times, this has meant that every electoral roll has been reviewed and updated not once but twice in every five years. The electoral rolls for the Vidhan Sabha elections that followed were therefore entirely digitised and up to date. Therefore, the reasons behind another SIR are unknown. The only reason why it was held could be that, having almost lost the 2024 Lok Sabha election, Modi was bent upon ensuring a more favourable result in the next Vidhan Sabha and Lok Sabha elections. The easiest way to obtain this was to disfranchise the most politically sensitised and estranged section of the electorate, and this was to be found among the migrant workers living in urban areas, especially those living in the large metropolises. The ECI obliged him by making it as difficult as possible for them to be counted in either original homes or their current places of work. When the figures of the SIR 2025-26 came out, the Election Commission knew that such an abrupt reduction in the size of the electorate within a single year would not be believed. Based on what it said, we learn the following:1. Approximately 3.1 crore of the voters deleted from the 2024 list in Phase 2 had shifted out of the state or polling ward permanently. 2. As many as 20% were found to be ‘absent’ i.e. they never turned up to check their status. The Election Commission’s numbers indicate that this is approximately 1.3 crores at the end of Phase 2, but 20% of 11.8 crore deletions amounts to 2.3 crore voters. 3. Another 1.3 crore votes are found to be “duplicates” at the end of Phase 2, i.e. their names were in more than one state or constituency. There is a chance that a large section of these were also migrant workers who had been registered in their current houses, (probably during the house-to-house verifications that still take place on a restricted scale), but had not been deleted from the electoral rolls in their original homes. 4. The number of unreported deceased after Phase 2 is 67 lakhs. 5. Names removed for other reasons are around 13 lakhs. There is little reason to dispute the last two grounds for deletion, but all of the first three affect the voting rights primarily of migrant workers who have left their hometowns and villages in search of a livelihood. The sheer scale of the deletions gives us an idea of how urban constituencies in India suffered the most.Migrant workers have been the main targetThe weeding out-process has been focused on migrant workers because disqualifying them is the easiest way to get the most insecure, and therefore the most politicised, voters off the electoral rolls. The weapon the Election Commission has used is refusal of the Aadhaar card as a proof of voter identity. To do this, the Modi government’s spokespersons revived an almost forgotten 2018 ruling by a constitution bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice K.S. Puttaswamy that the Aadhaar Card is a proof of identity, but not of citizenship. The Election Commission has delegitimised the Aadhaar card as a proof of voter identity by deliberately misreading the judgement. Recalling Section 4(3) of the Aadhaar Act , the bench had ruled: “An Aadhaar number…may be accepted as proof of identity of the Aadhaar number holder for any purpose…The majority [of the bench] also treats Aadhaar as a unique identity for residents, not as a citizenship register”.The judgement is clear and explicit: Aadhaar is a proof of identity for any function that an Indian citizen wishes to perform. Voting is one of those functions – in many ways the most important one. So the Aadhaar card will normally be sufficient proof for being added in the electoral roll. The Aadhaar card holder will only need to produce a second, additional, proof, if the Booth Level Officer (BLO) asks for it. The demand for additional proof is discretionary, not compulsory. It becomes compulsory only when the BLO has doubts about not the identity, but the citizenship of the person applying for registration.It is also important to note that if the applicant produces an Aadhaar card, and it is found to be genuine, they have the right to vote wherever they are living and does not have to go back to their home village, town or city to do so. All they need to do is fill in Form 6 of the Election Commission to inform it that they have moved to a new constituency and is seeking inclusion there. This is made imperative by the process, even though Form 6 is meant for first-time voters.The reason why the Aadhaar card is sufficient for every purpose except claiming Indian citizenship is the information an Indian applicant has to provide in order to get it. The applicant has to give a name, date of birth/age, gender, address and, where available, a mobile number.The applicant also has to furnish biometrics (at the enrolment centre), photograph, fingerprints and iris scans.Children under five need to furnish only a photograph and need to be enrolled through a parent or the head of the family.Children between five and 17 need to furnish their biometrics, and contacts of a parent or guardian.People also have to provide supporting documents (with originals for verification). Adults must furnish a proof of identity (name and photo) and proof of address and date of birth if this is asked for. For small children, a birth certificate and proof of relationship to the head of Family have universally been considered sufficient.Even a cursory glance at this list shows that anyone who has a genuine Aadhaar card has already met the conditions stipulated in the 2025-2026 SIR for gaining the right to vote. That is the reason why, from 2010 onwards, Booth Level and Election Returning Officers (BLOs and EROs) had habitually accepted the Aadhaar card, with at most one local confirmation, as sufficient grounds for inclusion in the voters’ list. This list is a dead giveaway, for it shows that Modi’s tame Election Commission had been ordered, and had agreed, to ignore the stipulations for getting an Aadhaar card, and to ask for the same supporting documents all over again. Otherwise it becomes impossible to believe that 118.1 million electors – almost one in every eight of those who were on the 2024 Lok Sabha voters’ list – did not have Aadhaar cards. So the most probable grounds on which they have been disfranchised are that they did not present themselves to the BLOs in their original home constituencies to ensure that they were kept on the election roll. The targeting of out-of-state workersThe people who would have had the greatest difficulty in doing so would have been the migrant workers and their families, especially but not only those working in other states. According to the 2011 census – the last one taken so far because of COVID in 2020-21 – more than 45 crore people were living in states other than their home states. More than half can be assumed to be wives and children but in 2011 an estimated 10 to 15 crores were income earners. Also read: Delhi SIR: Who Are the 47.56 Lakh People Knocked Out From the Draft Roll?Of this second figure, various labour studies had shown that a majority were migrant workers who had neither the income, nor the job security, to leave their workplaces for the days that they would have to spend on confirming their right to vote in their home constituencies .What is more, a large proportion of the migrant workers are either so poor, or have so little job security because they are daily wage workers) , that they cannot risk going back to their home constituencies for the several days it could take to confirm their right to vote. This would have been especially difficult for daily wage workers who had left their home states. These numbered between 6 and 10 crores in inter-censal estimates after 2011, including the Economic Survey of 2016-2017, but their numbers have doubtless grown rapidly since then . This is the category of voters, in search or official recognition and a minimum of job security, that brought the Aam Aadmi Party to power in Delhi in 2015, and kept it there for the next 10 years until it was pushed out by the BJP in 2025 through what looks to be a combination of vote manipulation and a tacit coalition with the Congress. AAP owed its rise to power to the fact that the electorate in Delhi is overwhelmingly made up of recent migrants to the capital, and because its entire programme of work throughout the 10 years it was in power had aimed at starting economic growth from the bottom of the human pyramid, and not from its top. Prime Minister Modi was acutely aware of this, but learned the wrong lesson from AAP’s victories, not that electoral success starts at the bottom of the human pyramid, but that it is the bottom of the pyramid that needs to be robbed of its vote not only in Delhi but all of India, if he and his party want to stay in power. The Election Commission that Modi created after getting the Parliament to pass The Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act in December 2023 is his most potent, but one can only hope that his last instrument for destroying India‘s democracy and keeping himself in power till the end of his working days.Prem Shankar Jha is an economist, author and Visiting Professor at Harvard University; formerly, editor of Hindustan Times and The Financial Express, Information Adviser to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. His books include Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West?, and The Dismantling of India’s Democracy 1947 to 2025.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.