Bihar SIR: 789 pages, 1 B.I.G. lie, 0 foreigners

Our country has never been short of manufactured bogeys. But over the past decade, floating a bogey seems to have become a national pastime. Remember the Covid era?

Right at the start of the lockdown, a rumour took off that a Tablighi Jamaat congregation at Delhi’s Nizamuddin Markaz had triggered the spread of Covid. The rumour mills — both official and those paying courtly obeisance — went into overdrive. Even sensible people fell for it.

Five years on, a court finally ruled this month that the entire story was pure fiction.

The police chargesheet didn’t even mention Covid. But did anybody care? The game was over, and the proceeds of TRPs had long been digested and burped.

The latest bogey on the same pattern is Bangladeshi infiltrators in voter lists. During the Jharkhand elections, the BJP’s election in-charge Himanta Biswa Sarma played the Bangladeshi card with great abandon. It didn’t work. No matter how hard you looked, you couldn’t find a Bangladeshi in Jharkhand.

The same toolkit was deployed again during the Delhi assembly polls, except this time, Rohingyas were included in the mix of alleged infiltrators. Most recently, the same script repeated itself in Haryana’s Gurgaon, where it turned out that almost all those targeted by the police were Indian citizens speaking Bangla — poor labourers eking out a living.

The same drama is being staged on a larger scale in Bihar.

Ever since the intensive revision of Bihar’s voter list (codename: SIR) got underway, a media campaign has been hammering away at the claim that the real purpose of this revision is to weed out ‘foreign nationals’ from Bihar’s voter list — specifically Bangladeshis and Burmese.

Look at the northeast corner of Bihar — the Purnia division, with four districts: Purnia, Katihar, Araria and Kishanganj. Flanked by Nepal on one side and Bengal on the other, this belt is called Seemanchal. The Muslim population here is far higher than in the rest of Bihar; in some pockets, Muslims are even in the majority. For weeks now, ‘sources’ in the Election Commission have been claiming that the real aim of this voter-list revision is to flush out Bangladeshi infiltrators in Seemanchal.

But here’s the obvious question:

The Election Commission has the authority to revise the voter list of select districts or tehsils. Why didn’t it simply do that?

Another question: who’s been running the country for the past 11 years? If there’s still fraud in the voter rolls, who is to blame?

Anyway, let’s set aside these arguments and look at the matter calmly, so we are not thrown by these round-the-clock bogeys.

Start with the map of Bihar. If ‘illegal foreigners’ are indeed entering Bihar, what are the porous access points?

Bihar does not share a border with Bangladesh; it borders Nepal. Yes, Seemanchal isn’t too far from Bangladesh, and cross-border movement isn’t impossible. But that’s nothing compared to Nepal.

Seven districts of Bihar share a 726 km open border with Nepal. Nepalese citizens can enter and stay in India without a visa. The two sides have deep familial ties — millions of Nepalese women are married into Indian families and have been voting here for decades.

Why, then, is all the noise about Bangladeshis and not the Nepalese? Is the concern really about ‘foreigners’ or is it about Muslims?

Forget geography — look at the economics. Bangladesh’s fortunes have changed over the past two decades. In 2024, Bihar’s per capita monthly income was a meagre Rs 5,570; in Seemanchal, it would be even lower. In the same year, Bangladesh’s per capita monthly income was Rs 19,200—nearly four times more than Bihar’s.

Around the world, migration flows from poorer to richer regions. Why on earth would a Bangladeshi abandon a better life at home and risk everything to live in Bihar?

Let’s move on to the buzz on WhatsApp University. You’ve likely heard the claim that these four Muslim-majority districts of Bihar have issued more Aadhaar cards than their population, implying that ‘foreign infiltrators’ have managed to get them. To verify this, just check the Aadhaar authority’s own website. It’s not just these four districts — 37 out of Bihar’s 38 districts have more Aadhaar cards than their estimated population.

In fact, across India, Aadhaar cards number 142 crore, whereas the country’s estimated population is 141 crore. None of this has anything to do with ‘foreigners’. The reason is simple: roughly a tenth of these Aadhaar numbers belong to deceased individuals. In other words, the Aadhaar narrative is just another bogey.

Now, let’s talk voter lists. Answering a question in Parliament on 10 July 2019, the government admitted that over the preceding three years, the Election Commission had found only three foreign nationals — one each in Gujarat, Bengal and Telangana — in the voter rolls for the entire country!

In January 2025, when the verification of Bihar’s voter list was completed, the Election Commission published district-wise voter and population data. The four Seemanchal districts looked no different from the rest of Bihar. So, just six months ago, during that verification, the Election Commission did not find a single foreign national in Bihar. Not one name was deleted on those grounds.

And here’s the kicker: After four weeks of shrill propaganda about ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ in Bihar, the Election Commission filed a 789-page affidavit in the Supreme Court about its ‘special intensive revision’ of the voter list. Aren’t you curious to know what it says about foreign infiltrators?

Not a single word.

After a month-long exercise, the Commission released data for 7.89 crore individuals — including forms submitted, deceased persons, migrants to other states, duplicates and untraceable names.

Know how many ‘foreign infiltrators’ are on that list? ZERO.

If that’s not a bogey, what is?