This came as a surprise to Toppo, for he lives with his mother, who is very much alive. Mary Toppo, 74, was only deceased in the eyes of the Indian government, which had recently launched a sprawling effort to verify the identity of every registered voter in Bihar—and to delete nonresidents and the deceased from the voter list. Clarence Toppo was vaguely aware of the verification campaign, he said, but nobody had contacted his family for documents, and they never got around to the paperwork.

In early August, Clarence Toppo, a 38-year-old IT worker from the eastern Indian state of Bihar, learned from a friend that his mother was officially dead.

In early August, Clarence Toppo, a 38-year-old IT worker from the eastern Indian state of Bihar, learned from a friend that his mother was officially dead.

This came as a surprise to Toppo, for he lives with his mother, who is very much alive. Mary Toppo, 74, was only deceased in the eyes of the Indian government, which had recently launched a sprawling effort to verify the identity of every registered voter in Bihar—and to delete nonresidents and the deceased from the voter list. Clarence Toppo was vaguely aware of the verification campaign, he said, but nobody had contacted his family for documents, and they never got around to the paperwork.

Then Toppo received more surprising news: Toppo, who was born and raised in Bihar, apparently no longer lived in the state. Two of his brothers had also been marked as absent from the state—one had indeed moved away, but the other had not. “I am very shocked,” Toppo said from his house in Ara, a city in western Bihar. “If I live in India and my [voter] identification is taken and removed from me, that’s a very big deal.”

Toppo is both a Christian, a minority within Hindu-majority India, and a Dalit, historically the most marginalized group within India’s hierarchical caste system. Frustrated by what he saw as both a state and national government that ignored minority rights, To