Deaths linked to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, completed in Bihar and under way in nine States and three Union Territories, are among the most tragic images of 2025. These images are depressing also because they conform to a trend, triggered in 2016, of poorly conceived and hastily implemented policies of the Narendra Modi government unduly burdening people and even killing them.
From demonetisation in 2016, to the countrywide lockdown suddenly imposed in 2020, to the three farm laws enacted in the same year, to the ongoing SIR process, death has been the leitmotif of these policies. On this list some would even include the Goods and Services Tax, rolled out in 2017, even though deaths on account of it are difficult to directly establish and quantify.
These policies turned into killers, so to speak, because of the Modi government’s poor understanding of the precarity of living, and surviving, in India. Or because it simply does not care. This is evident from the short timeline provided for executing most of these policies.
Take the SIR, which is dependent upon the Booth Level Officer (BLO) verifying voters who are dead or have shifted out, helping people fill up enumeration forms and collecting relevant documents, and uploading all these on a designated website. Their difficulties are compounded by patchy internet connections and having to take calls at odd hours from those worried over being excluded from draft electoral rolls, which are published a month from the day the SIR begins. The SIR comes to an end two months later, with the final voter list being published.
The timeline of three months for SIR 2025 is in sharp contrast to the eight months given for the intensive revision of 2003, the last time such an exercise was undertaken, in seven States. This despite the paperwork mounting in 2025, with people having to prove, unlike in 2003, their citizenship before they could be listed as voters. Expressions of disquiet by BLOs have led to FIRs being filed against more than 60 of them in Uttar Pradesh for negligence and disobedience. No wonder they have cracked under the pressure of work, as have also those who fear they lack appropriate citizenship documentation.
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At least 33 BLOs died between November 4 and mid-December, according to the Spect Foundation, a nonprofit research organisation. At least nine of them died by suicide. This figure does not include the Trinamool Congress’ claimed 40 SIR-linked deaths in West Bengal, with some of them being of BLOs. Heart-rending are the suicide notes of BLOs and the stories of those who keeled over because of heart attacks and strokes, unable to cope with the stress of work.
Their deaths would seem utterly meaningless in case the SIR does not discover a substantial number of undocumented citizens, or illegal infiltrators, in the previous voter list, the avowed purpose behind the Election Commission ordering this mammoth exercise. Identifying illegal infiltrators is the BJP’s ideological obsession. Yet, in Bihar, less than 400 voters were disenfranchised on the ground of being foreign nationals.
Demonetisation’s toll
Surprise was the keystone of the demonetisation policy that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on November 8, 2016, reducing, within four hours, Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 currency notes to worthless paper and sucking out 86 per cent of money from the economy.
The old notes could be exchanged for the new currency notes the government had issued. With the new currency notes in woefully short supply and strict limits imposed on the amount of money that could be withdrawn from banks and ATMs, serpentine queues of desperate people formed outside them. The government underestimated the importance cash has for Indians. People died out of exhaustion standing in queues, or because of the shock of their cash reserves becoming useless. Daily-wagers died by suicide as jobs dried up in the largely cash-based informal economy.
The first week of the demonetisation killed 33, with the toll ballooning to over 100 in the next two months. These deaths were in vain because the government’s purpose of using demonetisation to root out black money came a cropper, for 99 per cent of the old currency notes were returned to the banks. It does speak for the Indian elite’s mindset that the Supreme Court, in its 2023 judgement on the constitutionality of demonetisation, said, “Every noble cause [tackling black money] claims its martyr.”
Migrant workers certainly did not choose to become martyrs for the greater good of preventing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 virus in 2020. They simply did not have a choice. After Modi announced, on March 24, 2020, a complete lockdown countrywide, all economic activities came to a grinding halt. With little or no savings and having to pay for their accommodation and food in cities, lakhs of migrant labourers preferred to trek, cycle, or hitchhike hundreds of kilometres to their villages.
Government figures show more than a crore of interstate migrants returned home during the first wave of COVID-19-induced lockdowns, with around 35 million walking home or using unusual means of transportation. According to data collected by SaveLIFE Foundation, an NGO working in road safety, at least 198 migrant workers died in road accidents between March 25 and May 31, 2020. This figure would have certainly soared with time.
Deaths on the road also occurred because of exhaustion, heat stroke, and suicide. According to independent researchers quoted by News18, 971 deaths not directly caused by COVID-19 diagnoses had occurred as of July 2020, based on news reports of such deaths during the lockdown. The causes ranged from starvation, suicides, exhaustion, road and rail accidents, police brutality, and denial of timely medical care. Their passing away is eloquent testimony to the government failing to imagine the consequence of freezing economic activities on those with meagre savings or dependent on cash earned on a daily basis — or maybe it decided they could be “martyred” for the relatively wealthier classes.
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Yet the Modi government had the imagination to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic to stealthily open the agriculture sector to corporates. It did so by promulgating, on June 5, 2020, three agriculture ordinances, believing social distancing, then in force to check the coronavirus from spreading, would dissuade farmer unions from publicly protesting against them. Three months later, after the ordinances were enacted as laws, farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh swept toward Delhi, organising sit-ins outside and in the city.
They camped there for a year, with over 700 of them dying because of illness or exposure to severe heat and cold, according to the Samyukta Kisan Morcha, the umbrella body of farmer unions. The three farms laws were withdrawn in November 2021, not out of empathy for the suffering farmers, but because Modi’s BJP feared their protest could queer its prospects in the 2022 Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. It was not the Centre but the Punjab government that paid compensation to families of farmers who died during the protest.
This brief history of the Modi government’s policies shows that policies designed to execute pet ideological obsessions or protect and favour the wealthier classes become killers of those occupying the bottom rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. This possibility grimly stares at the poor again in the coming new year, with the sweeping alterations made to the rural employment guarantee programme.
Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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