New Delhi, Aug. 4 -- For thousands of voters in Bihar, casting a ballot has simply become a test of citizenship. The Election Commission of India's 2025 electoral roll revision aimed to 'filter out' the voter list has resulted in a bureaucratic and humanitarian disaster for Dalits, Muslims, landless peasants, migrant labourers, and displaced people. State-issued papers such as Aadhaar and voter IDs, which were previously praised as portals to welfare and inclusion, are now being discarded, putting countless people at risk of disenfranchisement, not as a result of fraud, but of systematic neglect. Democracy, in this situation, is not being protected. It is being filtered.

Crisis of Documentation and Identity

In regions such as Bihar the ...