Bharat Bhushan | Vote Deletion & ‘Infiltrators’: Amit Shah’s Great Diversion

Fighting the damaging optics of the ongoing mass agitation against alleged manipulation of electoral rolls through the SIR exercise, Union Home minister Amit Shah has gone on the offensive. He described the Rahul Gandhi-led Opposition movement as an “action plan to protect infiltrators”. Like a ventriloquist’s doll, BJP president Nitin Nabin, has echoed Mr Shah, claiming that Mr Gandhi was “engaged in protecting infiltrators”.

The accusation is more than political rhetoric. The Union Home ministry has launched a portal allowing members of the public, NGOs, government bodies and even “international organisations” to report unnatural demographic shifts and abnormal settlement patterns across India. Such “crowdsourcing” of information about “abnormal settlement” could potentially be weaponised to target minority communities, fuel social polarisation and to purge names from voter lists.

Mr Shah’s ministry has no centralised list of infiltrators detected in the last 12 years and no comprehensive information on the subject, leaving state governments to deal with it. So such an initiative will strengthen Mr Shah’s argument against the Opposition although it remains to be seen whether it produces usable information or not.

With elections in Uttar Pradesh and other states in sight, the BJP is also preparing a public campaign hyping up the infiltrator argument to rebut the Opposition’s questions about the SIR and the conduct of the Election Commission.

On the SIR, an administrative and institutional issue, the Narendra Modi government and the Election Commission are vulnerable to questions about whether eligible voters were deliberately excluded, whether deletions were properly verified, and whether the procedure and software used to remove names were reliable.

Framing the controversy in terms of “infiltrators” shifts the frame of discussion away from the accountability of state institutions. When Mr Shah talks about the security of the nation, the narrative acquires an emotional urgency. And accountability takes a backseat.

This reverses the direction of scrutiny as it turns the accusers — Rahul Gandhi, the broader Opposition bloc, supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party and other youth voices — into the accused. By his accusations, Mr Shah wants to divert the political energy of those protesting to defending themselves rather than keeping public attention focussed on voter-roll manipulation.

He seems to believe that an emotionally charged narrative connecting SIR to nationalism, national security and fears of a changing political balance between communities will resonate more with the public. In contrast, the Opposition is trying to communicate the technicalities of how voter deletions have occurred which could be less compelling.

Mr Shah is not dubbed as a modern-day Chanakya by his acolytes for nothing. His infiltrator narrative also links easily with BJP’s attempt to delegitimise the protestors by portraying them as anarchic and foreign-instigated.

These strategies taken together, hope to dull the sharp questions of the Opposition. It is a playbook that the BJP has used successfully time and again against the Opposition.

However, unless Mr Shah and the BJP provide evidence to support their claims, these will remain convenient bogeys. So far, they have failed to provide any evidence of inclusion of infiltrators in previous voter lists which have now been removed through SIR. In fact, in the seven years Mr Shah has been Home minister, his ministry has failed to maintain any systematic record of infiltrators identified, arrested and deported. Between 2014 and 2024, Parliament was told that 3,568 Bangladeshi nationals were formally deported. This was a significant decline from the 82,255 deported during the preceding decade, 2005-2013, when Congress-led governments were in power.

State-level figures, where available, are disjointed and episodic. Assam reported in its Assembly that 1,72,673 illegal foreigners had been identified up to May 2026. Earlier data showed that the state’s foreigners tribunals identified 47,928 illegal foreigners between 1971 and 2014, with several thousand processed in subsequent years.

West Bengal deported 4,800 illegal Bangladeshi migrants in early 2026. Delhi Police identified 1,589 Bangladeshi illegal migrants and 55 Rohingya nationals, handing them over for deportation between June 2025 and February 2026. In an earlier drive in 2025, Delhi deported more than 120. Gujarat accounted for nearly 1,500 non-border detentions of illegal immigrants from mid-2025. Maharashtra deported more than 110, Haryana 80, Rajasthan 70 and Uttar Pradesh 65. Taken together, although strictly they cannot be added, do not amount to a large number.

Investigations by the Reporters’ Collective demolish Mr Shah’s attempt to portray the SIR exercise as crucial to identifying foreign infiltrators. They show that the Election Commission’s software has no mechanism to flag whether deleted voters are foreign nationals.

The Election Commission’s latest figures for the 13.39 crore voters dropped through SIR do not establish how many were ineligible because they were non-citizens. Those dropped from the rolls were categorised as Permanently Shifted (6.30 crore), Absent or Untraceable (3.01 crore), Deceased (2.80 crore), Duplicate Entries (1.02 crore) and Other (0.26 crore). None of these separately identifies foreigners or infiltrators. The residual category of “Other”, comprising 26 lakh voters, cannot automatically be assumed to consist of foreigners.

Could one claim that the figure of absent or untraceable voters at 3.01 crore might be taken as the approximation of illegal voters because others are accounted for either as shifted, dead or duplicate entries? That also does not make sense as it would mean that nearly two per cent of the Indian population consists of infiltrators, an astounding proposition. And if that were to be believed, then what does it say about the efficiency of the Union Home ministry?

To substantiate claims of excluding “infiltrators”, therefore, the Election Commission must disclose how many of the 13.9 crore were genuinely ineligible voters, how many were restored to the rolls, and how many were foreigners.

The Supreme Court had directed the Election Commission to refer cases of voters deleted on grounds of non-citizenship to the Union Home ministry for scrutiny. There has been no disclosure of the number of cases referred to the ministry or the action taken. Yet, Shah continues to accuse the Opposition of defending infiltrators on voter rolls.

The official aim of SIR was to establish accurate electoral rolls, not to identify foreigners. However, the Election Commission cited the illegal inclusion of foreign immigrants as justification for SIR in Bihar. It failed to find any on the Bihar voter rolls.

Mr Shah is still disingenuously emphasising this as its stated objective without producing evidence that the exercise has identified infiltrators. This is nothing but political distraction.