130 Million Voters Erased and Platform-Assisted Censorship: India's Double Chokehold on Anti-Modi Protests

Mumbai-based standup comedian Brijesh Jha posted a video on Instagram on September 29 mocking India's Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Within just two days, it had racked up 1.7 million views on the platform. U.S. company Meta promptly took it down, citing vague "local laws," without specifying which legal provisions were invoked or whether it had received a direct government order or court ruling. The video accused Kumar—appointed by the Modi government—of disenfranchising millions of voters at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which was Jha's act of resistance after his own name and those of his family members were deleted from West Bengal's voter rolls.

Jha told Al Jazeera that, after learning he had been removed, "as an artist, the only thing I can do is create art, or protest." He refused to re-register and told Al Jazeera: "I think they'll see this interview, and I might end up in some detention center. I just want to see what happens. I won't register my name again." Yet in sardonic tones, he called out to Modi: "Please give me back my voting rights. You are a great leader with a 56-inch chest and shouldn't be afraid of a video."—a reference to a long-standing right-wing boast about Modi's chest size.

It wasn't only Jha's voting rights that were erased.

Political purge of the voter rolls

According to an investigation by the Indian Express cited by Al Jazeera, a special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls launched by India's Election Commission last June—ostensibly aimed at removing deceased, duplicate, or questionable voters—has deleted more than 130 million voters, roughly 14 percent of the national electorate. The report noted that the overwhelming majority of those removed are Muslims, who typically do not vote for the Hindu nationalist BJP; the Indian government has not released ethnic breakdowns of the deleted voters, and this composition has been estimated by opposition parties and media.

The Indian Express investigation also found that two of the three Election Commission members had formally dissented at least 14 times on SIR-related decisions. Kumar was appointed by the Modi government, and the opposition has accused him of acting on BJP instructions and demanded an independent inquiry into the decisions made during his tenure. Jha told Al Jazeera that his video was removed because the Modi government "got scared" after the dissents were disclosed.

Platforms' accelerated removal mechanism

The "local laws" Meta cited when removing Jha's video specified neither particular provisions nor whether the action was based on a government order or court ruling. This vagueness is itself revealing: when a U.S. platform cooperates, under the rubric of "local laws," with a repressive campaign against political satire in an electoral nation, the platform effectively becomes an outsourced instrument of censorship.

According to the Indian Express investigation cited by Al Jazeera, between March and July 2026, the Indian government issued nearly 195,000 content-blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube—one every 68 seconds on average. During the same period, India's roughly 600 million social media users generated about 78,000 pieces of content every 68 seconds. The government's public response—that "on average, it is reasonable that one of them may be illegal"—neither denied the volume of orders nor the existence of accelerated-removal rules. The Modi government subsequently tightened rules issued in February, requiring platforms to remove content within three hours (down from 36) after receiving a "illegal" designation from a government agency or court.

Political cartoonist Satish Acharya told Al Jazeera that some of his cartoons, posted as long as three years ago, had been removed, and his Instagram account was blocked inside India between September 28 and October 5. "At different historical stages, people have used cartoons as a tool to express protest and question those in power. With the rise of social media, cartoons take different forms—sometimes memes, sometimes short videos," the 55-year-old artist said.

Street protests and detention of opposition figures

After the Indian Express investigation disclosing internal Election Commission dissent over the SIR was published, street protests demanding Kumar's resignation erupted in multiple cities across India. On October 7, India's main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, was briefly detained by New Delhi police as he tried to march to the Election Commission office. Before being detained, he told reporters: "This country has been hijacked by Narendra Modi through stolen elections. What has been done to our country is treason. No one can escape." The BJP denied the allegations, accusing the opposition of being "engaged in a coordinated effort to topple the government" and of "deliberately attacking India's democratic and constitutional institutions."

Al Jazeera reported that the Indian National Congress and its political allies took to the streets again on October 8, their demonstration following a series of protests launched since October 2 by the satirical group "Cockroach Janta Party" and left-wing student organizations in Mumbai and New Delhi. The group has planned further demonstrations in New Delhi on October 10, with Kumar's resignation set as a precondition.

Humor as a form of resistance

Al Jazeera noted that a striking feature of these demonstrations is an increasingly creative vocabulary of resistance driven by humor, art, and music, much of it coexisting online and at street protests. Jha summarized it to Al Jazeera: "The more brutal the power, the more resistance expresses itself through softer, more humorous, more artistic means." As of publication, whether Jha would be detained remained unknown.