MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (‘VCK’) President T. Thirumavalavan has approached the Supreme Court challenging the legality of the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’) of electoral rolls in Tamil Nadu.
Filed under Article 32, the petition argues that the SIR, announced through a notification dated 27 October 2025 and scheduled to be carried out mere months before the State heads to the polls in April–May 2026, constitutes an arbitrary, exclusionary and constitutionally infirm exercise that places millions of marginalised voters at the risk of disenfranchisement. The challenge comes at a time when the Court is already seized of several petitions contesting the SIR process in Bihar, raising serious questions about the Election Commission’s powers, procedure and timing in undertaking intensive revisions of electoral rolls.
‘SIR will unduly burden Dalits, Adivasis, migrant labourers, working class’
The petition opens by situating itself against the broader democratic stakes involved. Thirumavalavan, himself a Dalit leader representing the Chidambaram constituency, asserts that the SIR is not a matter of routine administrative housekeeping; rather, its rushed and opaque implementation in Tamil Nadu threatens to unduly burden those who already confront entrenched socio-economic barriers i.e. Dalits, Adivasis, migrant labourers, working-class communities, women who relocate upon marriage, persons with disabilities and the elderly. According to him, the Commission has offered no plausible justification for initiating an intensive revision when the State completed a Special Summary Revision (‘SSR’) as recently as January 6, 2025 through which the electoral rolls were updated to reflect deaths, migrations and deletions of ineligible voters.
Central to the challenge is that the SIR’s timing, design and methodology violate Articles 14, 15, 17, 21, 325 and 326 of the Constitution. It argues that the SIR is “manifestly arbitrary” as it substitutes the home-based verification envisaged under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 with a new, non-statutory mechanism that relies on requiring voters to submit and track Enumeration Forms. The petition states that these forms have no basis in the Act or the Rules and that shifting the burden from Block Level Officers to individual voters creates a parallel regime for addition and deletion of names that the Commission is not empowered to create under Article 324.
Drawing on the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on indirect discrimination, especially in Navtej Singh Johar (2018) and Sukanya Shantha (2024), it further notes that the groups most vulnerable to wrongful deletion or exclusion are precisely those for whom electoral participation already requires overcoming structural disadvantages. For many Dalit and Adivasi voters living in geographically remote or informally recorded settlements, producing the wide range of documents demanded by the SIR is often impossible. Migrant workers, rarely settled at a single address for long, are at heightened risk of being marked “absent” during verification drives. Women who relocate after marriage frequently lack documentation linking them to either their natal or matrimonial homes, creating uncertainty about where they are to be counted. Elderly and disabled voters, who struggle with digital interfaces, are now expected to access online voter databases or fill out electronic forms despite the Supreme Court’s repeated insistence that access to essential digital infrastructure is a facet of substantive equality.
‘Wrongful deletion a violation of dignity’
The petition also frames wrongful deletion as a violation of the right to dignity under Article 21, citing the Supreme Court’s judgments in Puttaswamy (2017) and Maneka Gandhi (1978). For communities historically denied their full personhood, being struck off the electoral rolls carries an added symbolic harm and becomes an act of erasure that reinforces their social invisibility. The SIR represents not merely a flawed administrative process but an assault on the political identity of millions whose participation in democratic life has always been precarious.
Finally, the petition argues that the SIR threatens the legitimacy of the democratic process itself. Drawing on Robert Dahl’s theory of polyarchy, it notes that a democracy’s moral authority depends on its ability to guarantee universal participation, equal access and transparency. By ignoring its own 2004 guidelines on public participation and opting for a closed-door, document-heavy enumeration exercise, the Election Commission has undermined its constitutional responsibility to strengthen participatory democracy.
Tamil Nadu’s troubling history with SIRs
To underscore the risks, the petition draws on Tamil Nadu’s own history with SIRs. It recounts the widespread complaints following the 2002 and 2005 SIRs which led to the appointment of the P.J. Thomas Commission. The Commission found systemic errors ranging from inconsistencies in house-numbering to failures by enumerators and data-entry operators. The findings led the Election Commission to issue a set of safeguards in 2004 which included the creation of family identification tags, involvement of Resident Welfare Associations and Gram Sabhas in verification, utilisation of post offices to make forms widely accessible and decentralised processing of EPIC cards. However, the petition notes that almost none of these safeguards find a place in the present SIR guidelines of 2025. The omission, it argues, indicates a return to methods previously found to be error-prone.
The SIR conducted in 2005 led to the deletion of nearly 25–27 lakh voters which caused more than 50 lakh voters finding themselves missing from the rolls ahead of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Adivasi communities raised similar grievances during the 2016 State elections alleging that their names had been deleted without notice. The petition argues that intensive revisions undertaken with compressed timelines and insufficient safeguards lead to the marginalised communities bearing the brunt of wrongful deletions. This directly implicates the constitutional guarantee of universal adult suffrage.
Articles 325 and 326 were crafted as a deliberate repudiation of colonial franchise restrictions that excluded vast sections of the population through conditions of property, education, or social status. The petition draws extensively on the writings of Babasaheb Ambedkar. It recalls Dr. Ambedkar’s observation before the Southborough Committee that if the terms of franchise keep oppressed groups out of the political process, then “any scheme of franchise fails to create a popular Government.” The right to vote is the foundational right through which the citizen participates in the creation of the State itself. The petition points out that such “soft disenfranchisement” revives the very forms of restricted franchise the Constitution rejected.
Against this backdrop, it seeks the quashing of the October 27, 2025 notification and an order restraining the Commission from proceeding with the SIR in Tamil Nadu. With the Supreme Court already examining similar challenges to the SIR in Bihar, Thirumavalavan’s petition is poised to become a crucial test of the limits of the Election Commission’s powers and, more fundamentally, of India’s commitment to universal suffrage at a moment of growing concern about voter suppression and electoral integrity.