Myanmar’s planned election has drawn predictable international condemnation. Widely dismissed as a hollow exercise organized by a military regime that seized power through force, the vote is seen less as a democratic milestone than as an attempt to manufacture legitimacy. Yet the fixation on ballots and polling stations risks obscuring a far more consequential political act now unfolding in parallel: the junta’s accelerated nationwide census. Unlike an election, which may be boycotted, contested, or overturned, a census has enduring power. It defines who exists politically in the state’s official imagination-and who does not.

In Myanmar’s fractured landscape of civil war, displacement, and ethnic exclusion, the census is not a neutral administrative exercise. It is an act of authority that will shape citizenship, representation, land ownership, public spending, and legal rights for decades. Conducted amid mass displacement and territorial fragmentation, it risks hard-wiring exclusion into the country’s postwar order. For the Rohingya in particular, and for millions of internally displaced people across the country, being left out of the count could lock in erasure long after the last vote is cast.

Elections come and go. Censuses endure. While elections reflect a moment in time, censuses establish the baseline from which the state governs. They determine electoral boundaries, allocate parliamentary seats, justify infrastructure investment, and underpin citizenship frameworks. In stable societies, this makes the census a technical task with political implications. In Myanmar’s current context, it makes the census a political weapon.

The authorities are pushing ahead with enumeration even as vast areas of the country remain beyond their control and entire communities have been driven from their homes. According to United Nations estimates, more than three million people are internally displaced by fighting between the military and resistance forces. Over a million Rohingya remain stranded in refugee camps in Bangladesh, many after fleeing........

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