Erased From the Rolls: Raju Parulekar on India's Vanishing Muslim Vote

A Conversation Recorded in the Shadow of Two Elections

Raju Parulekar, a senior journalist and political analyst based in Mumbai, travelled to Delhi to record this episode of the Nous podcast with host Bushra Khanam. The conversation was taped soon after the Bharatiya Janata Party's wins in West Bengal and Assam, victories that Parulekar treats not as evidence of the party's popularity but as the latest instalment of a pattern he has been describing for years. Across roughly seventy-five minutes, he moves between the mechanics of India's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the conduct of the opposition, the difference between Hindu religious tradition and Hindutva politics, the imprisonment of student activists, and the government's foreign policy. The thread running through all of it is a blunt claim: that Muslims, and increasingly anyone who does not vote for the BJP, are being administratively pushed out of the political community altogether.

What Parulekar Says the SIR Actually Does

Parulekar's starting point is that the SIR exercise, ostensibly a routine cleanup of voter rolls, is not really about voting at all. "SIR is not for elections," he said. "It's a smokescreen." In his account, the BJP does not need the revision to win elections — he argues it has already secured that outcome through what he calls a compromised Election Commission and manipulated EVMs, a claim discussed further below. What the SIR does, in his telling, is something more permanent: it converts the absence of a name on a voter list into the absence of citizenship itself. He cited figures for the scale of the deletions raised in the conversation — roughly one crore voters removed in West Bengal, a comparable one crore in Tamil Nadu, and 2.83 crore in Uttar Pradesh, with the process now beginning in Maharashtra. Those numbers have not been independently verified here; they are Parulekar's own tally, offered without documentary citation during the interview.

He frames the SIR as the quieter successor to the 2019 push for a citizenship register paired with the Citizenship Amendment Act, which he says provoked such backlash precisely because it used the word "citizen" openly. The revision of voter rolls, he argues, achieves a similar disenfranchisement without naming it. His concern is that losing a place on the electoral roll cascades into losing eligibility for a passport and, eventually, any recognised claim to being an Indian national. He described receiving messages from Muslims, many from southern India, describing exactly that fear. He recounted one such message from a man who told him he had served in the Indian Army and fought in the Kargil war: "I have a passport. Still, my name isn't there. What do I do for my children?"

"Synthetic, Not Organic": Reading the BJP's Winning Streak

Asked whether the SIR alone explains the BJP's unbroken run of state victories, Parulekar rejected the idea that the results are simply organic. "BJP's victory isn't organic," he said. "It's synthetic." He pointed to the 2019 general election, when a channel called NaMo TV appeared during the campaign without the Election Commission ever investigating who funded or ran it, and to what he described as hours-long delays in vote-counting in Varanasi before Narendra Modi was declared the winner there. He counted himself among a small number of commentators, alongside the economist and columnist Parakala Prabhakar, who have argued the opposition should consider boycotting elections outright, comparing the situation to Bangladesh — while acknowledging that no opposition party is likely to take that advice. He leaned heavily on Rahul Gandhi's "vote chori" press conferences, in which the Congress leader presented named individuals whose votes, he said, were not reflected in official counts, as evidence that the claim of systemic vote theft is not merely a loser's alibi.

When the host pushed back — noting that the hatred visible at Hindutva rallies and the scale of anti-Muslim violence suggest a genuine, motivated voter base rather than a purely engineered one — Parulekar did not fully concede the point but drew a distinction. The instruments of manipulation, he said, may be imported, but the underlying sentiment is homegrown: "the ideology has been brewing here all along." He estimated the RSS's committed base at a stable one that has neither grown nor shrunk in a century, arguing that the organisation's influence is disproportionate because it commands the state rather than because its numbers have swelled. "The RSS lives not on the ground," he said, "but in the mind."

The "Israelisation" Claim

The most extreme argument Parulekar advanced, and one he returned to repeatedly, is what he called the "Israelisation" of India: a claim that the BJP and RSS are effectively directed by Israel and its intelligence agency, Mossad, and that the SIR is the Indian analogue of rendering a population stateless in the way he says has happened to Palestinians. He offered no independent verification for this beyond historical analogy — he pointed to Jana Sangh–Israel ties dating to the 1960s, to Suvendu Adhikari's invocation of Israel's actions in Gaza while discussing violence against Muslims in Bengal, and to a broader argument that "tools" of surveillance and election management circulate from Israeli suppliers to the Indian state. He also connected the 2016 demonetisation drive to what he described as pressure from international banking interests tied to Zionism, again without offering documentary support. These are serious and unverified allegations; they are reported here as Parulekar's own claims, not as established fact.

Bengal's Travelling Cadre

On the specific texture of Hindutva mobilisation in West Bengal, Parulekar described what he called a mobile auxiliary structure of BJP-RSS cadre that moves from state to state as election cycles demand, drawn mostly from Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, adopting local guises once they arrive. He said this cadre organised "Jai Shri Ram" chants and provocations such as encouraging people to carry fish in hand through Muslim neighbourhoods during religious occasions, and that viral videos of diaspora women weeping over Modi have been recycled across different countries and events. He argued that Bengal's own history — the trauma of Partition and a real, if often minimised, communal undercurrent — gave this campaign material to work with, even as he insisted that a genuinely free and fair contest, on a level playing field, would still favour Mamata Banerjee.

An Opposition That Isn't a "Revolutionary Force"

Parulekar was consistently unsparing about the opposition, arguing that parties like the Congress and the Samajwadi Party are, in his phrase, part of the same power structure as the government rather than a challenge to it. "Opposition parties don't come from the people," he said, contrasting them with what he called genuinely revolutionary movements — citing the farmers' protests at Delhi's borders as the kind of mobilisation Modi and Amit Shah actually fear. He singled out Akhilesh Yadav for staying silent after Yogi Adityanath's remarks about Bakra Eid prayers, saying the Samajwadi Party leader had a direct stake in the issue and still chose not to speak. He was more sympathetic to Rahul Gandhi personally, describing him as a rare figure of "integrity" within Congress, but argued the party's organisational strength has been hollowed out by BJP's poaching of senior leaders over the past decade, leaving it without the machinery to contest on equal terms.

He offered a specific account of how the BJP installs chief ministers it has not really had to win at the ballot box: by leveraging corruption allegations against defectors from rival parties to compel loyalty. He named Suvendu Adhikari, a former Trinamool Congress leader now installed in Bengal, alongside Eknath Shinde in Maharashtra and Himanta Biswa Sarma in Assam, as examples of leaders who, in his account, were pressured with corruption files and then required to prove their loyalty publicly — comparing Adhikari's rhetoric about violence against Muslims to the way a gang forces a new recruit to commit a violent act to prove allegiance.

Hinduism Versus Hindutva

A recurring theme was Parulekar's insistence on separating Hindu religious and philosophical tradition from Hindutva as a political project. Describing himself as someone who has studied the Vedas, Upanishads and Puranas more closely than most RSS members, he argued that Hindutva politics actively violates the ethical core of those texts. He cited a Sanskrit verse attributed to Vyasa — paropakaraya punyaya, papaya parapidanam, roughly "helping others is merit, harming others is sin" — to argue that a movement built on communal hatred cannot claim scriptural legitimacy. He also claimed that most RSS members could not recite the national song Vande Mataram in full, and argued that "Hindu" and "Sanatan" are not exclusively religious markers in the way the RSS presents them, tracing their etymologies to Persian and Buddhist usage respectively — a linguistic claim offered as his own view rather than settled scholarship.

That argument led him to a personal admission. Speaking as a Hindu, he apologised directly to Muslims for what he called the community's collective silence: "I apologise, on my own behalf, to you and to the entire Muslim community." He explicitly refused to exempt himself from responsibility, saying that anyone who had not spoken out was implicated, himself included.

Cinema and Selective Outrage

Parulekar extended the argument about complicity to popular culture, arguing that decades of Hindi cinema, including films made during Congress-led governments, routinely cast Muslim characters as terrorists while never depicting a Hindu terrorist on screen — despite the LTTE, a Sri Lankan Tamil organisation, being Asia's deadliest militant group of the era. He suggested that Bollywood's most powerful Muslim stars never used their leverage to challenge the pattern. He connected this to a broader complaint about asymmetric expectations: individual Muslims are routinely asked, microphone in hand, to publicly condemn violence anywhere in the world, while prominent Hindu religious figures are never asked to condemn violence committed in Hindutva's name.

Political Prisoners and the Price of Dissent

The conversation turned to activists jailed under India's anti-terror and sedition laws. Parulekar cited the case of Umar Khalid, held for years without bail in a case linked to the 2020 Delhi riots, saying Khalid was denied parole even to be with his mother during her surgery. He named Sharjeel Imam and Khalid Saifi as similarly imprisoned, and recalled the death in custody of the Jesuit activist Stan Swamy, whose Bhima Koregaon-linked case involved forensic reports from an American digital-forensics firm that found malware had been used to plant material on defendants' devices, in his account. He contrasted their treatment with the repeated paroles granted to the convicted godman Ram Rahim. "Umar Khalid will be remembered," he said. "Not me."

Asked what advice he had for Muslims navigating this period, Parulekar said he did not consider himself qualified to advise, but offered two points: that Muslims should resist being divided along Sunni-Shia lines and hold to a shared identity, and that the example of Imam Hussain's stand at Karbala should serve as a model of standing for truth regardless of the odds. "Wherever truth stands alone," he said, "remember Hussain."

Foreign Policy as Performance

Parulekar was similarly scathing about the government's diplomacy, describing a viral video of Modi's greeting during a UAE visit as choreographed like a 1960s Hindi film romance sequence, and arguing that foreign policy under this government has become a matter of stagecraft rather than substance — pointing to a photo opportunity with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni as another example. He referenced a Norwegian journalist whose pointed question to Modi was reportedly met with anger rather than an answer, framing it as evidence that the prime minister is unaccustomed to being challenged. Borrowing a phrase Rahul Gandhi has used, he called Modi a "compromised" prime minister, comparing the role to a colonial-era governor-general who served an external power's interests rather than the country's own. He tied this to a claim from Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, that India had voluntarily stopped buying discounted Iranian oil despite the geographic logic of the Chabahar port connection, reading it as another instance of Indian policy bending to alliance pressure from Washington and Israel rather than domestic interest. He also criticised the prime minister's public discouragement of fertiliser use, on the grounds that it hurts "Mother Earth," calling it hypocritical and dangerous given India's history of import dependence on foreign wheat before the Green Revolution.

"The People Will Write Their Own Destiny"

Asked, in closing, whether he expected anything to change by the next general election in 2029, Parulekar declined to offer a timeline. Elections alone, he argued, would not produce change; what was needed was a shift in mass consciousness comparable, he said, to how the worship of Santoshi Maa, a deity with no established place in Hindu tradition before a 1975 film of the same name, spread from a single screening into households across the country within a few years. Political awareness, in his framing, could spread the same way once enough people began speaking. "India will change," he said, "only when its people write their own destiny." He offered no prediction of when that might happen, leaving the question of what comes after twelve years of the current government's rule open rather than resolved.