IN THE NAME OF “PURIFYING” the electoral rolls, the Election Commission of India (‘ECI’) has launched a bureaucratic assault on the right to vote in Bihar. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’), now under challenge before the Supreme Court in Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI, risks disenfranchising lakhs of genuine voters; many of them poor, Dalit, tribal, or migrant, through a maze of impossible documentation requirements and arbitrary state suspicion. If allowed to stand, this exercise will not only gut India’s constitutional commitment to universal suffrage, but also recast the very meaning of citizenship as a conditional privilege contingent on paperwork, rather than a constitutional guarantee.
On June 24, 2025, the ECI issued an order directing a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, just months before the upcoming Assembly elections. Citing its powers under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, the Commission declared that voters not on the 2003 electoral rolls must now furnish documentary proof, not only of their own citizenship, but also of their parents’. A fresh “Enumeration Form” (not prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960) was introduced, and Aadhaar and ration cards were explicitly excluded as valid proof. It may very well be stated that Article 324 does not empower the Commission to override statutory safeguards under the RPA and the 1960 Rules. Any executive action must remain within the four corners of the statute.
In A.C. Jose v. Sivan Pillai (1984), the Supreme Court made clear that the ECI’s plenary powers cannot contravene laws enacted by Parliament. The SIR framework, by requiring parental citizenship documents and bypassing the forms and processes laid out in the Rules, subverts this fundamental separation of powers.
A miniature ‘NRC’, minus the safeguards
The move has justifiably set alarm bells ringing.
Despite the language of inclusion used in ECI press notes, the procedure adopted amounts to a presumptive suspicion of large swathes of the electorate. Citizens are being asked to re-qualify for a right they already possess, and in doing so, prove their entitlement not just to vote, but to belong. Nowhere does the Constitution require that the poor, the migrant, or the undocumented defend their citizenship to exercise their vote. Yet, the ECI has not only turned the electoral process into a test of documentation, but more worryingly has also stated, in its detailed guidelines, that those who fail to furnish the correct papers may be referred to “competent authorities as suspected foreigners.”
What was conceived as an exercise in electoral roll maintenance has morphed into a miniature NRC, with all its attendant dangers, minus even the fig leaf of safeguards.
This bureaucratic shift from enumeration to suspicion violates the very design of the Indian Constitution. As the petitioners before the Supreme Court have pointed out, the power to revise electoral rolls must flow from law, not executive fiat. Section 21(3) of the RPA, 1950 permits special revisions, but only for reasons recorded in writing. The ECI’s order lacks any empirical basis or documented reasoning. No data has been placed on record to suggest that Bihar’s existing electoral rolls are so corrupted as to merit such a sweeping overhaul, especially one conducted in the fraught weeks before a state election.
More egregiously, the ECI’s process circumvents the statutory rules that govern voter registration. Rules 8 and 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, envisage house-to-house verification through Booth Level Officers (‘BLOs’), not a documentation-heavy process that shifts the burden to the citizen. Instead of enumerating voters, the ECI is now interrogating them, through new forms, self-declarations, and parental documents. This shift is not only unauthorised but structurally discriminatory. As data shows, Bihar has historically had low birth registration and low possession of official IDs, particularly among marginalised communities. These are the very people now at risk of being erased from the rolls.
The Bihar SIR fails every limb of a constitutional test
The Supreme Court, in its landmark judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2018), laid down the proportionality test for any executive action impinging on fundamental rights: there must be a legitimate aim, a rational nexus, the least restrictive means, and overall proportionality. The Bihar SIR fails every limb of that test. The goal of electoral integrity cannot be achieved by stripping citizens of their rights, particularly when existing summary revision mechanisms already allow for deletion of dead or duplicate voters through due process.
This is not simply an administrative overreach; it is a constitutional subversion.
In form, the Bihar SIR is a voter verification exercise. In substance, it is an act of disenfranchisement. It strikes at the heart of Article 326, which enshrines universal adult suffrage, and undermines the basic structure of the Constitution, which rests on popular sovereignty. It has already sown confusion, panic, and exclusion across Bihar’s villages. BLOs lack clarity, voters are in the dark, and the timelines are impossible. A state with one of the highest migration rates is being asked to furnish residency-based proofs, even as its working population toils outside state borders.
One cannot miss the bitter irony that this Special Intensive Revision is being conducted in the year that marks the 75th anniversary of the Constitution coming into force. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar once reminded us that political democracy rests not just on the institutional machinery of elections, but on the conditions that allow every citizen to participate as an equal. The ECI’s actions betray that vision. It has chosen the path of exclusion under the garb of efficiency.
As the Supreme Court hears this matter, it must remember: the right to vote is not a matter of administrative convenience; it is the lifeblood of a republic.
The ECI’s Bihar order, if allowed to stand, will open the floodgates for similar exclusions elsewhere. The Court’s intervention must therefore not only be corrective, but also cautionary. It must reaffirm, in no uncertain terms, that the Constitution does not permit the state to ask “Who are you?” every time a citizen tries to vote.
Let us hope that constitutional morality, not bureaucratic zeal, prevails.