Protests are escalating in India over the revision of electoral rolls. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.

Born into a small village in West Bengal, Shahida Fakir had always taken her vote for granted. That was, until it was suddenly taken away. She presented officials with her Indian birth certificate and family land documents from the village going back to 1962. Both her parents had been on the electoral roll going back decades, so she showed proof of that too. But when the final revised voter list came out in April, Fakir was not on it.

The 38-year-old migrant worker, born into a poor Muslim family, was not alone. Since last year, 130 million names – more than the population of Japan – have been removed from India's electoral roll through a process known as SIR, or special intensive revision. In the nearly eight decades since India's independence, never have the voter rolls shrunk by such a huge amount over such a short time.

The Narendra Modi government has called SIR a legitimate exercise to clean up the electoral rolls. Overseen by the election commission, tens of millions of dead and duplicate names have been removed. Yet so have the names of millions of living Indian citizens.

Critics allege that the pledge to "purify" India's voter roll of illegal immigrants has instead been used for more sinister purposes – disenfranchising tens of millions of Muslims, other minorities, and poor and lower caste communities, who are largely not BJP voters.

In a matter of weeks, nationwide anger at SIR has boiled up and spilled out on to the streets of India's biggest cities, presenting a formidable challenge to the government. Over the weekend, Delhi was transformed into a high-security fortress of barricades, roadblocks and tens of thousands of police and paramilitaries who detained thousands of people, as they attempted to stop youth-led protests calling for the man who oversaw SIR, the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, to step down immediately.

On Monday, opposition parties – who have decried SIR as a "weapon for vote theft" by the Modi government – drew tens of thousands of supporters as they marched through the capital and presented a petition to the supreme court, demanding Kumar's resignation. The youth-led Cockroach Janta party (CJP) movement, who were behind the call for Saturday's action, have vowed to "fight on" in their protests against SIR.

Opposition and civil society leaders allege that SIR has already given the BJP an electoral advantage in states such as Bihar and West Bengal, claims the party denied. Others say the exercise has had even more concerning implications: under changes to SIR unilaterally implemented by Kumar, the election commission has become the arbiter of Indian citizenship, a sweeping overreach of its remit.

The consequences are already playing out in West Bengal, where Modi's Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) recently came to power and began a crackdown on "illegal" immigrants, complete with several new detention centres. Civil society groups say Muslims excluded by SIR are being targeted.

Fakir was among them. Just three months after the voter list was published – and while her hearing to challenge her exclusion was pending – she was picked up by police and accused of being an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant.

In July she was pushed over the border to Bangladesh, a country she had never been to nor had any connection with, and remains stuck there. "I have all the documents to prove I am an Indian citizen," she said in a tearful phone call from the Bangladesh border village where she has been sheltering. "I fell on their feet and begged the police not to send me to Bangladesh but they pushed me over the border."

A Bangladesh border guard officer confirmed Fakir's account. "We checked all her documents and are convinced that she is an Indian citizen," they said. In September, her family submitted a petition to the supreme court challenging her deportation. The Indian government was given a month to respond.

"All I want is to return to my family and my home in India. I am waiting desperately for that day," she said. The backlog of millions of voters in West Bengal challenging their exclusion means it could be years before Fakir's case is heard.

Those across West Bengal who have been stripped of their votes speak of their terror of being accused of being an alien in their own land. Some have had benefits taken away. Mohammad Hedayet Ullah Siddiqui, 80, from the North 24 Parganas district, said his grandfather had been a freedom fighter for Indian independence and three generations of his family were on the voter rolls. Yet after SIR, Siddiqui described his "humiliation" on finding his name gone.

"With my name erased from the voter list, I am in constant terror. What if they send me to a detention camp?" he said. "I cannot bear to think about being separated from my children and grandchildren at this age, especially when all my ancestors have been buried in India."