Amit Shah said 3 cr infiltrators in voter list. He needs a factcheck

Home Minister Amit Shah, at Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rally in Hyderabad on Monday, November 2, said India’s voter lists carried 3 crore “infiltrators.” Off the 13 crore names struck off in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists, over 6 crore had shifted, he said. About 3 crore were dead. One crore were duplicates. And 3 crore, he went on, were “Bangladeshi infiltrators.”

If the claim is true, it points to a huge failure of the BJP government at the Centre. If it is not, it is a reckless thing for a Home Minister to say. Either way, he has some questions to answer.

Who did they vote for?

If 3 crore infiltrators were on the rolls, since when? And did they vote? If they did, they voted in 2014, 2019 and 2024, elections the BJP won. Does the Home Minister believe those results were shaped by illegal voters? If not, what does his number mean?

Shah has been Home Minister since 2019. The BJP has run the Centre and with it national security, since 2014. Keeping out illegal migrants is the Home Ministry’s job, not the Election Commission of India (ECI). If 3 crore people got voter cards and stayed on the rolls through 12 years of BJP rule, that is not a charge against the Opposition. It is a charge against his own ministry.

Whose numbers are right?

Shah’s 3 crore matches, almost exactly, the number of voters the ECI listed as “absent.” It means the Booth Level Officer (BLO) could not find them at home or their form never came back. Not being at home does not make anyone a foreigner.

Hindustan Times asked the chief electoral officers of 26 states and Union Territories. Six gave a count. Between them, these six states have 9.86 crore voters. They found about 1,600 suspected foreigners.

Many were not even from Bangladesh. Karnataka found 545 Nepalis in Bengaluru North alone. Dakshina Kannada found Americans, Australians, Canadians and Britons. Kerala and Goa found people holding foreign passports, most likely Indians who had moved abroad.

More than 100 election officers in Bihar, where SIR first began, gave The Reporters’ Collective figures for absent, shifted and dead voters. Not one reported finding a foreigner. The ECI’s own software had no option to mark a voter as foreign. The Home Ministry, in a January RTI reply, said it keeps no central data on infiltrators.

So, either the officials who did the work are wrong or the Home Minister is. They cannot both be right.

Shifted where?

Shah says over 6 crore voters had simply shifted. But a voter who moves from Patna to Pune is still an Indian voter. He should be struck off in Patna and added in Pune. If they had only moved house, most should be back on a list somewhere.

Instead, final rolls have shrunk in state after state, even after new voters were added. Gujarat had over 5 crore voters before SIR and has 4.40 crore now. Kerala has about 9 lakh fewer. So where did they shift to? More likely, they moved for work, never got re-enrolled and quietly lost their vote.

Some of the 3 crore “dead” surely were dead. But how carefully was this checked? Civil society groups audited four booths in Delhi’s Trilokpuri and checked 1,236 deleted voters. One in three had been wrongly removed. Three of 102 people marked dead were alive. More than half of those marked “absent” – the very category Shah calls infiltrators – were living at home.

If mistakes on this scale show up elsewhere, the damage runs into crores.

Who pays the price?

The people most likely to be wrongly struck off are those least able to fight back: migrant workers, the poor, women who moved after marriage, Dalits, Adivasis, minorities and transgender people, many without the papers SIR asks for. 

Calling them infiltrators from a rally stage turns a clerical mistake into a question mark over their citizenship.

A clean voter list is a fair ask. But an exercise that drops crores of names, keeps no record of the foreigners it set out to find and then has its failures relabelled as infiltrators is not cleaning the rolls. It is shrinking the electorate.

The BJP is defending SIR with a fervour that suggests it expects to gain. It should be careful. Voters who find their names missing do not forget who called them infiltrators.

Shah has dared Rahul Gandhi to a debate in Parliament. He should accept and bring the list of 3 crore names. If he cannot, he owes those voters an apology.

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