ON MAY 15, 2023, TWO WEEKS after more than 1000 homes were demolished in South Delhi’s Tughlakabad, the displaced people gathered at Jantar Mantar for a protest.
A day prior to the protest, as we sat with a group of women on the rubble of their demolished homes and explained the travel arrangements to Jantar Mantar, one of them, Reena Singh, asked, “Shall we take our voter cards along? We want to hold those up in front of the media, and ask if they have any meaning anymore.”
This was not a usual reference to unmet promises of elected governments, but to something more fundamental.
Well aware of the law, they did not claim that the voter cards proved their ownership or possession of the land which they still called home. They merely demanded that the state must acknowledge those cards as a proof of their legal existence as citizens, and stop dismissing them as “encroachers”. They believed that as citizens who elected their government, they were entitled at least to a transparent and accountable demolition process, to safeguards against police violence during demolitions, and to a fair hearing. Voting, they believed, also gave them the right to demand legislative attention regarding the absence of any statute that guaranteed the right to shelter.
The “encroacher” label indeed robs the working classes of recognition as citizens. It robs them of their identity as workers who are crucial cogs in the wheel of the urban economy. It denies the harsh reality that they have been compelled to live in slums and other informal settlements due to low remuneration and the persistent denial of statutory labour rights that would have enabled a higher living standard. The Delhi Slum and JJ Rehabilitation and Relocation Policy, 2015, acknowledges that the substantial informal workforce “performs critical economic activity” in domestic, sanitation, cleaning, construction, delivery and other sectors. The workers believe that their labour entitles them to a life of freedom and dignity in the city that they build and run.
The “encroacher” label indeed robs the working classes of recognition as citizens. It robs them of their identity as workers who are crucial cogs in the wheel of the urban economy.
‘We are citizens, not encroachers’ is a sentiment has been echoed again and again, among people threatened with demolition and displacement across Delhi-NCR. People have turned to the courts, only to realise that stay-orders on demolitions are few and far between, and that the courts aren’t too concerned about holding government agencies accountable for disregarding due process and for denying dignified rehabilitation. The affected people have responded by invoking their suffrage. In meetings, protests and demonstrations, they continuously ask, “If the government gave us voter cards for these addresses in unauthorised colonies, and we have voted in so many elections, how can they suddenly declare us illegal?”
Pertinent question indeed, because the ongoing demolitions of informal settlements in Delhi and other urban centres like Ahmedabad and Mumbai, are not merely reiterations of caste and class-based violence and marginalisation. These are part of a process of political manipulation – of engineering voters out of the electoral process.
The ruling party appears to suspect that migrant workers belonging to Muslim, Dalit, backward caste, and non-Hindi linguistic groups (Bengali, Tamil) aren’t dependable voters for the Hindu nationalist cause. A close examination of state actions in the colonies across Delhi-NCR, inhabited by these groups, reveals multiple interconnected mechanisms to disenfranchise them.
Saffron strategies
The Tughlakabad demolition in May 2023 had been carried out on the basis of a Delhi High Court order directing the Archaeological Survey of India (‘ASI’) to clear the surroundings of the historic Tughlakabad fort of encroachments. The Supreme Court had set the ball rolling in this case way back in 2016. It had transferred the case to the Delhi High Court for it to ensure compliance with the Supreme Court’s orders of removing both “unauthorised construction” and “encroachers”.
The Delhi High Court demanded a status report from the ASI in November 2022. In December 2022 the Aam Aadmi Party (‘AAP’) won the elections to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (‘MCD’), defeating the Bharatiya Janata Party (‘BJP’). The AAP won handsomely in all three wards (Harkesh Nagar, Tughlakabad and Pul Pehladpur) of the Tughlakabad Assembly constituency.
By the admission of the Tughlakabad residents, the then parliamentarian from South Delhi, Ramesh Bidhuri, belonging to the BJP, who is also a local strongman in Tughlakabad, had warned them of dire consequences for voting against the BJP soon after MCD results were declared. A demolition notice was served on January 11, and it was reissued in April after the Delhi High Court refused to stay the demolition. The homes were subsequently bulldozed on May 1.
A few days prior to the Jantar Mantar demonstration, thousands of displaced residents had marched to Bidhuri’s home demanding justice. Nothing came of it, and the workers were warned not to demonstrate at Jantar Mantar. I was personally requested at the demonstration, “Sir, your slogans against Modi are good, but please do not say a word against Bidhuri ji.”
Even though the demolition had taken place on the basis of a court order, the ruling party’s role in prodding the demolition is too evident to miss. Legitimate question marks have been raised over the independence of the judiciary with regard to core constitutional matters and indeed, “encroachment” removal in a corner of South Delhi would appear too minor an issue to most upholders of the law.
The spirit of revenge against voters is reminiscent of feudal armies that prevented Dalit and backward caste voters in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh from exercising their franchise right up till the 1990s. The history of Dalit and backward caste political assertion in post-colonial India is also a history of bloody battles for the substantive implementation of the right to vote and of the promise of free and fair elections. After 75 years of universal adult franchise in law, and after decades of its implementation by fighting off entrenched feudal forces, we are witnessing a push-back against this right by the government’s bulldozers.
Demolitions had been increasing in Delhi for several years, but started peaking in the lead up to the G20 summit in 2023, and has continued thereafter. All of these were conducted by the BJP led union government’s agencies such as the Delhi Development Authority (‘DDA’), ASI, and the Railways. After the BJP took over power earlier this year in the Delhi government, a massive escalation ensued within weeks of the new government coming to power.
The spirit of revenge against voters is reminiscent of feudal armies that prevented Dalit and backward caste voters in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh from exercising their franchise right up till the 1990s.
Mechanisms of disenfranchisement
While no comprehensive survey of the caste and religious demography of the displaced people exists, a pattern is quite evident. The 5.7 million people in Delhi living in either slums or unauthorised colonies, belong primarily to Muslim, Dalit and backward caste groups, and nomadic communities.
Constituting nearly 30 percent of Delhi’s population, they form a huge part of the electorate. Having established deep-rooted patron-client relationships with the Congress and then the AAP, they are counted as unreliable voters by the BJP. Anti-incumbency and a combination of other factors led a section of them to vote for the BJP in the 2025 Assembly elections, decisively tilting the election in favour of the BJP, but only after the BJP reached out to them with promises which the AAP government had not fulfilled. A complete moratorium on demolitions was a key poll promise.
Both AAP and Congress retain the bulk of the support of this section of Delhi’s population. Often living in mixed settlements, the BJP’s politics of polarisation holds limited appeal for them, while its tirade against subsidies and the AAP model of welfare-ism does not sit well with many. The targeted demolitions are carefully calibrated to destabilise and disenfranchise a section of them and keep the rest in fear, while not uprooting a number big enough to completely alienate this section of the electorate.
Many people who lost homes found their names deleted from voter lists during the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Many did not know if their names were there or not, because they had been displaced too far from their designated constituencies – to the fringes of the city or back to their villages. Many lost their documents in the rubble of their homes.
In addition to the demolitions, in the last few months, the fear of detention and deportation has added to the displacement of the working population in Delhi-NCR. In the weeks prior to the 2025 Assembly elections, Bengali speaking backward caste Muslim migrant workers in different parts of Delhi started getting detained under the suspicion of being “illegal Bangladeshis”, despite possessing voter cards and other government issued documents such as PAN and Aadhar, and had to pay for their release. This escalated earlier in July 2025 in Gurugram following a “secret” Home Ministry guideline that asked all states and union territories to detain people if they suspected them to be illegal Bangladeshis or Rohingyas.
The guidelines do not mention a clear basis on which suspicion can be cast on Indian nationals, nor do they specify the procedure by which the verification is supposed to take place, and which documents count as proof of citizenship. After a month of intense racial profiling of Bengali Muslim migrant workers and widespread brutality against them in Gurugram, thousands of workers have fled their homes out of fear of detention and deportation. The fear has quickly radiated from Gurugram to the working-class colonies of Delhi, where many are ready to flee.
A large-scale destabilisation of the urban working-class population is the cumulative effect of the triple mechanism of demolition, deletion and deportation. Destabilisation is a silent disenfranchiser.
Forced to live between cities and villages, many are likely to fall through the cracks in the voter registration process. This is evident in the way lakhs of migrant workers are losing their suffrage in the course of the Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) in Bihar. At the same time, hostile urban settings, which see migrant workers as “encroachers” or “illegal immigrants”, are discouraging them from being politically visible and vocal.
Institutionalising unequal suffrage
Akin to the demolition of threatened informal colonies of Delhi, the validity of documents has emerged as a key issue in the Bihar SIR process.
On July 21, the Election Commission (‘EC’) assured the Supreme Court that a person will not cease to be a citizen merely on being found ineligible for registration in the electoral rolls under the SIR. While the EC has insisted that ineligible voters would not find their citizenship cancelled, the Home Ministry, on August 13, in an answer to a Lok Sabha question by CPI-ML MP Sudama Prasad, failed to specify the “categories of valid documents” that someone would need to prove citizenship in India. Sixty-five lakh people have been kept out of the draft electoral rolls in Bihar, but it is not clear on what grounds each has been removed.
However not everywhere are migrants making themselves heard. More often or not they lack a political voice because of being stuck between places and therefore unable to vote.
The SIR in Bihar, the Foreigners’ Tribunals in Assam, the Home Ministry guideline that ravaged Bengali speaking working class communities in Gurugram, the administrative arbitrariness and judicial nonchalance in demolitions of Muslim, Dalit and backward caste homes, combined with the absence of statutory guarantees of housing and land rights in urban India, indicate the formulation of a legal-administrative architecture to institutionalise and expand working class disenfranchisement.
As a result of continuous mobilisations by housing justice organisations and opposition parties, demolitions have temporarily stopped in Delhi. But the Delhi government’s plans to implement the Dharavi model of redevelopment suggests the likelihood of demolitions on an even larger scale.
The Dharavi Model – a public-private partnership model involving the Adani group – has been criticised by many experts for opening doors to massive real estate speculation benefiting developers and land sharks, while the poor are likely to be left with inadequate housing, disrupted livelihoods and broken social networks.
According to the 2011 Census, there are over 450 million internal migrants, of which a massive 54 million are inter-state migrants. The number has certainly grown since then. This is increasingly having a political impact in regions of out-migration like Bihar, and places receiving migrants like Delhi. The recent registration of 12 lakh migrant workers in Tamil Nadu for the disbursement of welfare provisions has raised concerns about its political ramification if they were to vote in Tamil Nadu as a result of exclusion through the Bihar SIR.
However not everywhere are migrants making themselves heard. More often or not they lack a political voice because of being stuck between places and therefore unable to vote. The vote matters to them, for it is a passport to dignity and rights in lands where they are culturally alienated and socio-economically subdued by unfriendly employers, exploitative contractors,and overbearing builder lobbies.
Citizenship in India was formulated at a time of a great migration – not due to economic necessities but due to political transformations. Partition created a large number of refugees and their registration as voters played a key role in developing a sense of citizenship among newly freed Indians. It created what academic Ornit Shani calls a “passion for voting”. The ensuing belief in the power of the vote to change society opened new horizons for Indian democracy, socially and politically empowering historically marginalised communities.
A successful engineering of migrant working classes out of elections at this juncture is going to be a huge setback to working class suffrage and by extension to the very foundations of democracy.
Displaced workers holding up voter cards in protests against demolition is a welcome sign. It shows that people are ready to fight their disenfranchisement. But displaced people cannot win this battle unless fellow citizens and political parties stand with them. And this is a battle that Indian democracy cannot afford to lose.