Learning to co-exist with the flawed workings of a government document used to be an undesired yet critical part of coming of age in India. Your father is Mohammad in the passport, Md on the voter identity card and Mohd on the ration card. Your mother ages a decade between two voter lists. Your address is spelt three ways, none of them correctly. For seventy years we called this an Indianism, shrugged and moved on. The state made the errors and the state forgave them. Not anymore. The errors are still the state’s but the penalty is now yours.In the past decade, two exercises have transformed this penalty into policy.Completed in 2019, Assam’s National Register of Citizens (NRC), required every resident to prove that they or their ancestors were in India on or before 24 March 1971. The more recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began in Bihar in 2025 and has since extended across more than a dozen states, requires voters already on the electoral rolls to link themselves to an earlier roll, or produce documents, to stay on the roll. Both were sold to the public with the same vocabulary. Those elected to the highest offices in the land speak passionately of “infiltrators” and “illegal immigrants”.The prime minister warns of ghuspaithiye and Amit Shah once called Bangladeshi migrants “termites”. Nobody was fooled about who these words were aimed at. The dog whistle was audible to everyone and many cheered. Once understood as election-season politics of exclusion, this dehumanisation has been turned into a form, a hearing notice and a deletion list which keeps showing up in different formats every few years.Assam spent about Rs 1,600 crore of public money and six years, under the Supreme Court’s supervision, on the NRC. It excluded 19 lakh people, a figure that satisfied nobody, least of all those who demanded the exercise. This month the central government told the Supreme Court it has still not issued the rejection slips those 19 lakh need to appeal. In the meantime, those excluded are neither citizens nor foreigners. They are in a stateless limbo. Last year, Bihar’s SIR struck 65 lakh names from the draft roll on similar premise.The principle of burden of proofThe principle of burden of proof is so fundamental that it is taught in first year of law school. It simply states that whoever asserts a fact must prove it. Official records are presumed to have been made properly, and the authority that made them must answer for their errors. A voter on the electoral roll is there because the state put him there. If the state now says he does not belong, the burden should be the state’s. Even though the Supreme Court has stated that the presumption that an entry was properly included continues to operate, the reality of SIR could not be further from the truth. This exercise asks every voter in a state to prove, at once, that the state got it right the first time, using a roll the state itself prepared.Such inversion of the principle of burden of proof was at play during the NRC as well. In 2019, Amnesty International India documented the case of Abu Bakkar Siddiqui, a daily wage labourer in Assam who was declared a foreigner and detained on the same day because his grandfather appeared as “Afer Ali” in the 1966 roll but he had called him “Aper Ali”. During the SIR in West Bengal this year, the Election Commission of India (ECI) invented a category called “logical discrepancy” for voters including those whose father’s name did not match the 2002 roll.Sixty lakh people were placed under adjudication and 27 lakh struck off. One of the many casualties was Mohd Daud Ali, an army veteran who sustained bullet injuries during the Kargil War. He could not vote in West Bengal’s legislative assembly elections earlier this year nor could his children.This burden does not fall evenly. Samina Bibi (name changed), lacking formal education and married into another village, produced ten documents before a Foreigners Tribunal, a quasi-judicial body set up to determine whether a person is a foreigner or not, in Assam. Her voter card was rejected as a legacy document because it linked her only to her husband. After the SIR, in West Bengal, women make up to nearly 62% of those deleted or under adjudication. In 2021, the Supreme Court had recognised that an ostensibly neutral rule which falls disproportionately on women may violate Article 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution. A rule demanding a paper trail from women married at 16, linking her to her parents does not have neutral consequences. Recently, in West Bengal’s Nandigram, an analysis matching names to deletions in the supplementary lists of the SIR estimated that Muslims, a quarter of the electorate, accounted for 95% of deletions.People living with disability fare no better. Sadique Ali, who lived with speech impairment and an intellectual disability, was declared a foreigner in Assam after his brother misspoke the year their father died. Recently, in West Bengal, a man with an 80% disability crawled across a block office floor to his hearing even though SIR’s notification promises that there will be no harassment of the old, sick, poor and specially abled.It is easier to lose your vote than to correct your father’s nameBoth these processes also overwhelmingly rely on the fiction of executive independence to correct the errors. Such concentration of remedial power in the executive is not consistent with fair trial standards. In Assam, only two of 63 Foreigner Tribunal members in 2015 were judges. In 2017, members who declared fewer than 10% of cases foreigners were marked “not satisfactory“. SIR appeals go to the district magistrate and then the chief electoral officer, both members of the executive and the Supreme Court counts this two-tier executive appeal as a safeguard.Meanwhile, it is difficult to not see this calculation as being unequivocally political. In Hyderabad, draft deletions exceeded the 2023 winning margin in all 15 constituencies. In Uttarakhand they exceeded the 2022 winning margin in 45 seats. When the elections are won and demagogues come back, those removed from the different registers will still be fighting in this unfair system, which is designed to exclude, to belong to this country.In 2005 the Supreme Court complained that it was easier to win a capital case than to prove a man was an illegal migrant and treated this as a problem with the law. Two decades later it is easier to lose your vote than to correct your father’s name. The state cannot find its own records. It has found a solution. To make you find them.Aakar Patel is the chair of Amnesty International India. He posts on X @aakar__patel.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.