India, Oct. 3 -- A particular kind of exhaustion settles into a person's voice after weeks of chasing the same Government office for the same unanswered question. That exhaustion was everywhere at Jantar Mantar on Friday, carried by people who had not come for politics so much as for an answer nobody would give them.

Among the crowd was a homemaker in her fifties from Vishwas Nagar, who had spent the past several weeks moving between offices after learning her family person's name had been struck off the electoral rolls during the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR). Her own name had passed through the process cleanly. Her children had not, even though they voted in previous elections without incident.

To fix it, she gathered every...