A Textbook Case Of Election Omission

Democracy is about ballots, but it is also about memory: who protects both, who wants to reset them? As Bihar gears up for its next Assembly election, shadows are lengthening over the electoral rolls, and questions rising. At the same time, school textbooks are being made to adapt to a selective vision of the past.

Outlook’s September 11, 2025 issue dives into these omissions—of voters, voices and versions of history—that are reshaping both politics and classrooms. Will it be for the better? A wide selection of reporters, columnists, lawyers, commentators and historians weigh into this debate, and what it means for India in this issue.

From the controversial Special Intensive Revisions (SIR), which the Opposition outright calls 'vote chori', to the decline of an institution, the Election Commission of India, in the public eye, to the rewriting of textbooks that erases inconvenient truths, the story of India is rapidly becoming one of deliberate exclusions. Who will get counted? Who will be remembered? Who decides?

This issue unpacks the contested terrain of democracy, memory and identity, which are once again forced to collide.

On the ground in Bengaluru’s Mahadevapura, where voter rolls have swelled and warped, N K Bhoopesh unravels a decades-long saga of duplicate names, bogus entries and unexplained surges in voters. Is it fraud, migration or a convenient blurring of both? He explains it all in 'Mahadevapura: Where Strangers Came to the Rolls'.

Rajya Sabha MP and fiery voice of the Opposition, Manoj Kumar Jha, warns in 'How Free and Fair?' that without moral courage, democracy will fade. And that the Election Commission will soon risk being remembered not as custodian of democracy but collaborator of authoritarian forces. Bihar’s SIR revision, which looks like it will exclude 65 lakh voters, is a bitter instance of all that is at stake for an institution, and a democracy.

Aditya Sondhi, a seasoned advocate, reads the fine print of the Election Commission’s actions and silences in 'A Chink in the Edifice'. The guardian of free and fair polls, he argues, risks becoming a bystander in its own field.

Nalini Singh, the veteran journalist who exposed booth capturing during elections in the 1980s and '90s, recalls the lessons from that pursuit: persistence over the years is crucial, setbacks must be met with resilience and the willingness to improvise and official claims must always, always be interrogated, she writes in her account of covering the 1989 election in Bihar, which she 'Captured on Camera'.

Book bans and enforced forgetting in Kashmir. Ather Zia traces how news archives vanish, Martyrs’ Day is erased and her own work is banned in 'A Dulling of Memory', a beautifully crafted short essay on how words will, even so, outlive censorship.

From Partition narratives recast to identify “culprits” and pride projects, in 'A Class of Controversies', Outlook's Avantika Mehta tracks the ideological spin being given to NCERT textbooks. Speaking to historians and teachers and educationists, who highlight the dangers of history being used as propaganda.

Outlook's Kashmir correspondent, Ishfaq Naseem, visits classrooms, experts and teachers alone, slowly uncovering how they feel about their past being rewritten through text books for schoolchildren. Article 370 becomes a “popular demand,” Dogra rule becomes benevolent: But children, scholars and lived memory tell a completely different story in his piece, 'Attack on Past & Present'.

Faith and mental health: is one a balm and the other a burden? Which one fits what slot? In 'Keep the Faith', British-Indian psychologist George John explores how religion can heal and protect, but also why it needs integration, not isolation, from what scientists understand about mental health.