– Md. Sami Ahmad
In the charged run-up to Bihar’s 2025 assembly elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah unleashed a barrage of rhetoric, painting the state as a sieve for “infiltrators” – a coded term often aimed at Muslims, declaring them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They are alleged to be trying to weaponize the spectre of “infiltrators” aimed at polarising voters and galvanising their Hindutva base. The Election Commission of India too jumped into this fray, but it came up with an empty tally.
This election, starting November 6 with results on November 14, has become a battleground not just for votes but for narratives of belonging.
The final voter list was released on September 30, and the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, stood before the press later at Patna, hailing a “purified” electorate but demurring on the very question at the heart of the storm: How many infiltrators were actually identified?
This conspicuous silence, after months of divisive propaganda, exposes the BJP’s alleged polarisation attempt as a high-stakes gamble that risks inflaming communal tensions while delivering little or no evidence to back its claims.
The CEC claimed that among the massive list of deleted names – comprising deceased, shifted, and duplicate entries – there are indeed individuals identified as “foreigners.” He chose not to answer the question directly and took an evasive route by maintaining that the exact, consolidated number of confirmed “foreigners” removed from the list is not compiled at the central level, as the process of identification and deletion is handled on a decentralised basis by EROs.
This decentralisation means that while the Hindutva political class speaks of hundreds of thousands of “infiltrators,” the official data shows the vast majority of deletions are “routine administrative corrections”, with the number of foreigners removed being dubbed “negligible”.
This evasion underscores a stark reality – months of fear-mongering have yielded scant evidence, leaving communities divided and BJP’s strategy under scrutiny. This is also a serious question about CM Nitish Kumar’s stand on this issue, as there is no official word from him, although his partymen, considered close to BJP, either failed to counter this false narrative or silently succumbed to it. Analysts say that the ECI’s ‘evasion’ inadvertently weakened the political narrative by refusing to centralise the critical data point.
This political narrative of Ghuspathiya (Infiltrators, read Muslims), amplified through rallies and social media, was forwarded as ‘the’ reason for SIR of voter lists, promising to purge rolls of foreign elements ahead of the 2025 assembly polls.
The RSS and BJP leaders, including Modi and Shah, have consistently campaigned across states like Assam, West Bengal, and Jharkhand by making the elimination of “ghuspaithiyas” a core political promise. In political terms, the same happened in Jharkhand, where the bogey of infiltration was made a polarising tool that failed.
The ECI commencement of SIR of Bihar’s electoral rolls on June 24th was instantly weaponized by the ruling establishment to push a narrative of massive “infiltrator” deletions. While Narendra Modi and Amit Shah sought to polarise voters with charges of illicit immigration and demographic change, the political offensive has been nulled by bureaucratic complexity, ECI’s own data structure, and a sharp counter-charge regarding the Union government’s duty to secure borders.
The controversy stems from the political amplification of ECI’s initial goal versus the final bureaucratic reality.
The ECI notification explicitly stated that one of the critical objectives of the revision, particularly in border regions, was to weed out electors identified as ‘illegal foreign immigrants’, giving instant political fodder to the ruling establishment.
The final list saw the number of total electors drop from 7.89 crore in June to 7.42 crore, a net reduction of approximately 6%. This net figure, however, masks a colossal bureaucratic undertaking involving the deletion of over 65 lakh names in the draft roll, followed by removal of an additional 3.66 lakh electors in the final stage. One report noted that while 3 lakh voters were flagged across the state for document discrepancies and “doubtful citizenship” (suspected to be of Bangladeshi, Nepali, or Myanmar origin), the final published figures did not specify how many of these notices translated into confirmed deletions based solely on non-citizenship grounds.
The BJP’s top campaigners wasted no time in seizing the narrative, particularly targeting the Muslim-majority Seemanchal region, which abuts international borders and has been the epicentre of the revision drive. Speaking at rallies in Purnia and Forbesganj, PM Modi asserted that “every infiltrator has to go,” and accused the Mahagathbandhan of prioritising “vote bank politics” by “defending and shielding the foreign infiltrators.”
Amit Shah doubled down, vowing to “drive out infiltrators” and accusing the INDIA bloc. Shah’s fiery speech on September 27 in Purnia even framed the polls as a referendum: “For Rahul baba, Lalu, and company, it’s about securing votes for infiltrators; for us, it’s about protecting Bihar’s sons.” He even alleged that the Opposition’s ‘Voter Adhikar Yatra’ was effectively a ‘Ghuspaithiya Bachao Yatra’.
Critics, including Opposition leaders, decry it as classic Hindutva propaganda, designed to polarise voters along religious lines in a state where Muslims constitute about 17.7% of the population. Such claims conveniently spike during election seasons without accountability.
The Opposition, however, has deftly turned the tables by highlighting the ruling establishment’s inherent responsibility for the very issue they are campaigning on. It points out that since 2014, NDA has controlled the Union government, which, via the Union Home Ministry, is constitutionally responsible for international border security, passport control, and the deportation of foreign nationals.
RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav dismissed the issue as a calculated “diversionary tactic,” challenging the NDA’s long tenure in power: “If there are so many infiltrators in Bihar, what have you been doing all along? Border security and checking infiltration is the job of the Union government you lead.”
Furthermore, the Opposition has raised allegations of “vote theft,” claiming that the complex documentation requirements and lack of transparency risked the mass disenfranchisement of genuine, eligible voters, particularly those from poor, Dalit, and minority communities with historically weak documentation.
