HUNDREDS of Indian MPs joined mass protests in New Delhi today against revisions to the electoral roll in Bihar, India’s second-biggest state by population.

Bihar has elections due in November and opposition parties say the changes to the voter list will disenfranchise millions of people — with the aim of boosting the chances of India’s ruling party, the Hindu chauvinist BJP, of retaining the control it currently exercises there in a coalition government.

Police blocked the protesters from marching on the Election Commission headquarters, and briefly arrested some, including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.

The revised list asks voters to provide documents such as birth certificates, passports and matriculation records, which critics say are often not available to poorer residents of one of India’s poorest and least literate states. They say the exercise will affect minorities, including Muslims, the most.

The Election Commission says the “intensive revision” is a routine update to ensure accuracy and is needed to avoid the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants.”

But an editorial in People’s Democracy, published by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), notes that, under Indian electoral law, “the onus of proving citizenship was never [previously] thrust on the voter” and that the sweeping changes are “essentially no revision, but a ‘de novo’ drawing up of the roll.”

The new list of voters is suspiciously smaller than that of 2020, while previous studies in Bihar suggested that the proportion of its residents registered to vote was already lower than it should be. The new list seems to assume nearly four million people have left the state, it charged, while “absurdly” not recording anyone as having moved in.

“This is obviously an exercise in ‘mass exclusion’ and not ‘mass inclusion,’” the CPI-M charged.