WW statement: Restore voting rolls in India now!

It is with alarm and outrage that Workers World Party hears the news that the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who heads the right-wing, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has caused to be deleted from voting rolls over 52 million registered voters, the vast majority Muslim and other oppressed peoples, just days before scheduled, critical elections in West Bengal.

Workers World Party — a communist party founded in 1959 in the U.S. — is in absolute solidarity with global forces who are demanding immediate restoration of the voting rolls in India. We raise a fist to comrades of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, from whom we learned of this electoral battlefront in the global class war.

This mass disenfranchisement via deletion from electoral rolls has been orchestrated by the Election Commission of India (ECI) itself through a process it euphemistically calls a Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Using untested artificial intelligence technology and surveillance software, the Election Commission “detected” alleged “logical discrepancies.” This led to millions of deletions for possible “immigration issues.”

The right of all Indians to vote has existed since the 1947 independence from British colonialism and democratic procedures established in the early 1950s. India’s ruling class now boasts 308 Indian billionaires, an increase of 59 in just the last year in the world’s most populous and one of the most impoverished countries. That India’s capitalist ruling class would choose such tactics to now deny bourgeois democratic voting rights sounds painfully familiar to workers and oppressed people living in the U.S. today.

These “divide and conquer” tactics in India are the same tactics being used by the billionaires of the MAGA Trump regime in Washington, D.C. Here the regime has also spent the last year gerrymandering voting districts, terrorizing immigrant, working-class communities and purging voting rolls of Black, Latine, Indigenous and other oppressed peoples, especially throughout the U.S. South.

The BJP’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and targeting is completely in sync with the messianic, fascist-minded cabal in the White House. Prime Minister Modi’s visit to occupied Palestine and embrace of genocidal war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu 72 hours before the U.S.-Israeli assassinations of Iran’s Supreme Leader and over 160 schoolchildren on Feb. 28 signaled the warmongering nature of India’s ruling-class support for imperialism’s settler-colonial projects in West Asia in general.

Workers World Party is in solidarity with the demands of the Indian American Muslim Council (IAMC). IAMC President Mohammad Jawad said in an April 13 statement: “The SIR process has been weaponized to systematically strip Muslim citizens of their most fundamental democratic right. When 95.5% of voters deleted in a single constituency belong to one religious community that constitutes only 25% of the population, this is clearly electoral engineering on a communal basis. The Election Commission of India, which is constitutionally mandated to be an impartial guardian of democratic rights, has instead become an instrument of the ruling party’s agenda to diminish Muslim political participation.”

As an April 11 exposé at the Indian news site inwire.in reports: “In West Bengal the conduct of the exercise has resulted in mass exclusion and disenfranchisement. Unlike in other states, 6 million voters were rushed through a rapid adjudication process. Of this 6 million, roughly 3.3 million were found eligible, while 2.7 million were declared ineligible. Set against the broader pre-revision numbers, the total electorate has been slashed by 11.61%.” That is more than the margin of victory in the last elections!

With two rounds of elections in West Bengal scheduled for April 23 and April 29, it is impossible that millions of purged individual voters could appeal and win back their right to vote in the next week. The only just resolution is the demand of the unjustly disenfranchised: “Restore the voting rolls now!”