Roll Call to the Aliens

Bihar's Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls sparks whispers of disenfranchisement amid civic desire to keep the 'ghuspethiya' away

- By Md Asghar Khan

In Chapar Diyara, a flood-prone village that straddles Bihar's Katihar and Bhagalpur districts, the school bell has been temporarily silenced by bureaucracy. At the village's primary school, Rakesh Ranjan, a regularised teacher, begins his day with a smile and a tap on the biometric attendance app on his phone.

"I'm always here before time," he says, standing in a half-constructed building where teachers trudge in with slippers in one hand and spare clothes in the other during the monsoon.

But for the past roughly one month, schoolwork has been paused. Several teachers are working as Booth Level Officers (BLOs), part of a statewide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to re-verify voters. The task: go door-to-door, collect voter reenlistment forms and verify identities—without clear guidance on what exactly counts as proof.

The Election Commission's stated goal is to clean the voter rolls across India, starting with Bihar, which has Assembly elections later this year. The initiative has triggered both civic participation and quiet panic. "They take our rations, they live here without papers," says Rishi Kumar, a young resident of Chapar Diyar, referring to recent news about the "threat to national resources such as food grains from the ghuspethiya". The term ghuspethiya is spoken with conviction here, but actual sightings are rare. Ask people if they have seen an illegal immigrant, and the answers turn vague or comical. "I've seen them,” says one man confidently. Where? “In Calcutta. They were tourists.” Another man chimes in: “We hear about them on mobile news. But here? No, no one’s ever seen one.”

Jitender from Sadhua Chapar, the village next door, believes outsiders can be identified by their language. Then he pauses and asks suspiciously, “Are you with citizens or infiltrators?”