Khalid Saifullah is hero of hot-button apps. He’s using tech to ‘save’ India’s Muslims

New Delhi: Hyderabad-based software engineer Khalid Saifullah has a tech solution for every problem Muslims are facing in Modi’s India. From defeating NRC to identifying missing Muslim voters to opposing the triple talaq ban, the 45-year-old has developed an app for almost every burning issue.

“The solution to the problems cannot be found using thousand-year-old methods,” says Saifullah, dressed in a blue Nehru jacket, sipping coffee at Khan Market. “I give confidence to people so that they can fight their own battles through technology.”

He calls himself a one-man ‘technology movement’. He begins signature petitions, connects Muslims to government schemes, and highlights Muslim contribution to India’s freedom struggle. He’s a digital phoenix. As political movements and trends change, new apps rise from the ashes of older ones.

He has independently created nearly 20 websites and apps so far—from the Shaheen Bagh app to the Free Ration app and the Mera Leader app. But the most in demand these days in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections is the Missing Voters app, which has the software to record a citizen’s details like household members, assembly constituency and address, identify unregistered votes, and apply for new voter IDs.

His phone doesn’t stop ringing with requests from people to add their names to the voter ID list, but Saifullah doesn’t have the manpower to verify the details of each and every caller or user and register them on the electoral rolls. Now, he’s exploring the option of linking the voter app to NGOs and citizens’ platforms. They can use the software and the app to register new or missing voters on the electoral rolls.

As many as 1.18 lakh people had applied for voter IDs between 2019 and 2021, before Missing Voters was de-listed from Google PlayStore for allegedly failing to comply with its terms and conditions, he claims. In the run up to the 2019 elections, it emerged as a ‘trending app’ on Google PlayStore. “It recorded over 80,000 downloads on Android, and 5,000 on iOS, and resulted in 40,000 people being registered to vote,” says Saifullah.

Now, he wants to revive it. The number of voters he was able to register is just a drop in the ocean.

My grandfather once told me, ‘If you have skills, use them to improve society, or else those same skills will become a noose around your neck on Judgement Day’

-Khalid Saifullah

Last year, an Election Commission survey found that two lakh voters are ‘missing’ in Uttarakhand alone. And across India, in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, reports suggest the number was as high as 30 crore—mostly people from urban areas, young voters, migrants, women, and Muslims.

It’s why Saifullah was in Delhi recently to meet representatives of Bharat Jodo Abhiyan, a citizens’ collective formed to “protect and promote Constitutional values and democratic institutions”.

“We have also used the Election Commission app to register people, but it does not work properly. Using this would be helpful,” says social activist Kavitha Kuruganti, a member of Bharat Jodo Abhiyan. The talks for a collaboration are still ongoing, but Kuruganti says it’s a step in the right direction. “More such initiatives are needed.”

It’s hard to pin Saifullah down—app developer, activist, politician. He’s all rolled into one, but also greater than the sum of his parts.

Apps for free ration to ‘missing voters’

Whenever there is a call to action, Khalid Saifullah steps into the fray. He identifies a hot-button issue, and comes out with apps geared towards helping communities and activists on the ground.

Saifullah’s app journey began with helping Muslims with education material in 2007, around the time he joined Google India as a software engineer. “I can’t take the students to the lectures but I can bring the lectures to them,” he says. The app, Self Practice and Assessment Software, was for students preparing for Andhra Pradesh’s Engineering Agricultural and Medical Common Entrance Test (EAMCET), but has since been shut down.

On 15 August 2016, Khan launched the Muslim Freedom Fighters app, designed to educate students with stories, rare pictures, and quizzes about 155 freedom fighters, but this app as well is no longer available. The same year, he also created an app, also defunct, for the All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) to help it respond to the Law Commission during the legal battle over triple talaq.

December 2019 was a turning point for Saifullah. It was when Amit Shah introduced the Citizenship Amendment Bill (now an Act). Amid fears that Muslims would be targeted and rendered stateless, people started calling Saifullah to talk about jail and detention centres.

“Shah had frightened the people very badly. I thought, let us prove Amit Shah completely wrong. My app will save India, and so I developed the Defeat NRC app,” says Saifullah. The app, which is no longer operational, helped users build family trees, verify citizenship documents, and stay informed about protests in their constituency. It also offered chat support, police permission forms, legal aid, and poster creation tools. More than 72,000 people downloaded the app.

Shah wants to change the form of resistance. When the rest of India and the world started taking notice of the women of Shaheen Bagh who were protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act, he launched another app named after them.

Through (Missing Voters app), I was able to help enroll most of the women living in slums who were out of the electoral list (in Shivadi). Everyone’s voice is important in democracy. And no one should be left out

-Smita Chaudhari, Congress leader

In its description, the now defunct Shaheen Bagh app in English, Hindi, and Urdu, claimed to have “100 plus articles” that Saifullah has written since 2014, videos and interviews, as well as an ‘ask me’ feature. During the pandemic, he launched the Free Ration App for people affected by the lockdown to access rations, and connect with kirana stores and grocers in their neighbourhood, which was covered in local editions of newspapers.

Many of his calls to action take place under the banner of the Social Data Initiatives Forum (SIDF), where he is one of the directors. Apart from initiatives like providing scholarships to children and undertaking flood relief work, the SIDF also releases data-driven reports. Last year, it released a report saying that as many as 40 per cent of students who failed the Class 12 board examinations in Hyderabad were Muslims.

But the data that got everyone talking was his conclusion that of the 12.7 crore missing voters, 3 crore were Muslims and 4 crore were Dalits. This was back in 2019, ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, and the timing of its release was perfect. Not only was it widely covered in the national media, with reports in Business Standard and the Times of India among others, but also by a section of the international press like Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, and Arab News.

To arrive at this conclusion, Saifullah and his team of data analysts cross-checked single voter households from census data against the Election Commission’s voter list. They used common surnames and found that among Muslim and Dalit families, 17 per cent of households had only one voter each.

At the same time, Saifullah also partnered with NGOs for on-ground surveys in 10 assembly constituencies across Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Uttarakhand. There, volunteers claimed to have found instances of people with valid voter cards whose names weren’t on the election rolls.

“There is a lack of education and activism among these [Muslim and Dalit] communities. Nobody is bothered to see whether their names are on the electoral lists,” he said in a 2019 interview with Foreign Policy. Cut to 2o23, and little has changed, he insists. “There is still a lot of work to be done.”

The Missing Voters app proved to be useful to citizens irrespective of their caste or religion. Smita Chaudhari, 40, a Congress leader from Mumbai, says she used the app in 2019 to enroll 3,ooo people from Shivadi (also called Sewri) assembly constituency in the run up to the Lok Sabha elections.

“Many people still have their names missing from this list, and they come to me to get their names registered,” says Chaudhari, who would like to use a working version of the app before the assembly elections.

The Congress leader, who last contested elections in 2009 from the Shivadi assembly seat and has since assisted in campaigns, found the app relatively easy to use. It had tabs such as ‘Apply for Voter ID’, ‘Missing Voters by Polling Booth’, ‘Correction Voter ID’, and so on. Once the registration process is complete, a long list of volunteers appears on the app user’s screen. At the bottom, the app provides the option for users to become volunteers and help others get enrolled in the national database.

“Through this, I was able to help enroll most of the women living in slums who were out of the electoral list. Everyone’s voice is important in democracy. And no one should be left out,” says Chaudhari.

Having worked at Google, Dell, and later at Innova Solutions, Saifullah could have easily climbed the corporate ladder to earn lakhs a month.

Scepticism about skills, motives

The viral success of the Missing Voters app has brought Saifullah a fair amount of recognition, but not everyone is convinced of his numbers or apps, most of which are now defunct. Over the last few years, the software engineer has been working with political parties, interacting with politicians, and increasingly entering the activist space.

What Saifullah is doing is only excerpting the data, but the question is, how is he interpreting the data? Nobody is there to question him

-Bengaluru-based policy analyst

“He is an agenda-driven person,” says a 59-year-old policy analyst and academician in Bengaluru, who at one point in his career was associated with the Manmohan Singh government in an advisory capacity. He raised questions about Saifullah’s work and his data interpretation, going so far as to call it “unethical”. He argued that while Saifullah has the software engineering skills to develop apps, there is nothing in his career trajectory to indicate training in big data.

“What Saifullah is doing is only excerpting the data, but the question is, how is he interpreting the data? Nobody is there to question him,” says the policy analyst, requesting anonymity. He explains that data interpretation requires specialised skills, and lacking them could lead to misinterpreting data, such as using small sample sizes to exaggerate significance, or manipulating numerical data to influence perception.

“This is the work of academicians or researchers,” he said.

Given that he has collaborated with opposition parties, Saifullah has also faced criticism that his political affiliations muddy the waters, but he says he has learnt that without their help “solving problems is impossible”.

Coding for change, not cash

Saifullah, who got his engineering degree from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Andhra Pradesh, in 2002, shrugs off naysayers. He’s not playing for credit or criticism.

Having worked at Google, Dell, and later at Innova Solutions, he could have easily climbed the corporate ladder to earn lakhs a month. But from as long as he could remember, he wanted to do something more for his community, he says.

He wants to see more Muslims in the IT sector and STEM fields. “It’s difficult [for Muslims] to get jobs in the IT sector,” he says.

Growing up in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh, he was inspired by his maternal grandfather Syed Mazhar Hussain, a well-respected lawyer. Watching his grandfather prioritise cases of social justice had a profound impact on young Saifullah.

“My grandfather once told me, ‘If you have skills, use them to improve society, or else those same skills will become a noose around your neck on Judgement Day’,” he says. These words still resonate deeply within Saifullah. “I want to keep my grandfather alive through my work,” says Saifullah, who has the support of his wife and two daughters.

It’s hard to pin him down—app developer, activist, politician. He’s all rolled into one, but also greater than the sum of his parts.

“Game on, I am here to save the minority community. And, I am your opposition,” says Saifullah, thumping the table with his hands.