Months after massive street protests over a university exam scandal forced the resignation of India's education minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government is facing a fresh wave of demonstrations over an even more contentious issue: the right to vote.
Last year, India's election authority embarked on a sweeping program to clean up voter lists across the country, arguing the move was required to preserve electoral integrity by, for instance, removing fraudulent or deceased voters.
Since then, some 130 million names have been deleted from final or preliminary electoral rolls, according to tallies from official data compiled by activists. Activists and some voters have challenged the process, saying it was opaque.
In 2024, India had about 970 million registered voters.
In recent days, opposition parties, student groups and a youth movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party have protested around the country, calling for the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the veteran bureaucrat overseeing the cleanup of the voter rolls.
"This is an issue the government will not be able to quell," said Prashant Bhushan, a lawyer who was briefly detained during protests over the weekend in New Delhi.
The Election Commission didn't reply to a request for comment. The election body has previously said that the voter rolls are preliminary and that all eligible voters will be given the chance to be included.
Bhushan, who is representing activists in legal challenges to the voter-list revision, said many people have been surprised by the process. Tens of millions were struck off the draft lists for failing to fill out forms sent to their last known address or for other paperwork issues -- previous revisions relied on door-to-door verifications. Other voters received notices asking for proof of their identity after computer software flagged them for discrepancies in demographic details or over minor misspellings of their names.
For the first time, people trying to register to vote have been asked for declarations that their parents or grandparents were previously voters. Activists complained that such provisions hadn't been required of voters previously.
"You can't use an arbitrary legal process to disenfranchise such large sections of people," said Bhushan.
Saurav Das, a spokesman for the Cockroach movement, said many young first-time voters are facing difficulty in registering to vote after being asked to show proof that their parents or grandparents were on voter lists from two decades ago.
On Monday, police barricaded the roads to the Election Commission's headquarters in New Delhi after a group of retired government officials and civil-society leaders attempted to protest there by serving a "public impeachment" notice to Kumar, the chief election commissioner.
Security forces were out on Tuesday in the capital to prevent a planned march by opposition parties. The Cockroach party, which has given voice to the grievances of young Indians, called for new protests on Saturday.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, a lawmaker in Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party, said on Tuesday that critics of the cleanup process were trying to cast doubt on the legitimacy of elections won by his party.
"Tens of millions of people on the rolls were found to be deceased," he said. "Should the dead be allowed to cast a vote?"
The Supreme Court has so far upheld the validity of the revision effort, but has said the election body must follow proper procedures.
The software used to review the electoral rolls flagged certain family details -- such as a person who has five siblings or more -- as discrepancies.
"This is not a surprising thing in India," said Amrita Johri, an activist who has brought a legal challenge to the process. "Literally everyone born in the 1950s has five or more siblings."
In other cases, the software has flagged people for having an age gap of less than 40 years with their grandparent. That wouldn't be unusual in a country where women have traditionally had their first child at a young age.
In Delhi, about 4.7 million people out of 14.5 million were removed from the draft roll for failing to return the forms, while 30% of those who made it on the draft rolls were flagged for review, according to one petition filed before the Supreme Court.
Nationwide, about 70 million names have been removed in states where the revision is final, said Anjali Bhardwaj, who is part of that challenge, while about 60 million names have been removed from draft rolls where the process is still under way.
In the wake of an outcry, fueled in part by increasingly critical news coverage by Indian journalists, the electoral body defended its processes, but also announced that electoral officers will go to the homes of voters who have been flagged or rejected to review their documents.
Some critics of the process have alleged that the review, and in particular the targeting of demographic details, is aimed at removing Muslim minority voters, many of whom are seen as unlikely to vote for the BJP.
In the state of West Bengal, where the BJP won in a landslide election earlier this year, about nine million people, or more than 10% of voter names, were removed from the rolls before the vote. While many were due to duplicate entries or deceased voters, some were also flagged by computer programs for having especially large families or improbable age gaps between parents and children. Most of those people were Muslims, according to an analysis of electoral data by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research group.
India's Home Minister Amit Shah has defended the revision process in the state, which borders Muslim-majority Bangladesh. He said the people removed from the rolls were foreigners or had registered using false documents.