Context: The Election Commission of India (ECI) filed a counter affidavit in the Supreme Court in response to the writ petition challenging the constitutionality of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, currently underway in Bihar.
ECI has defended its authority to require electors to prove citizenship through fresh documentation as part of the SIR exercise. In Bihar, the last SIR was held in 2003.
Relevance of the Topic: Prelims: About Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and its legal basis. Mains: Issues with SIR.
What is the SIR (Special Intensive Revision)?
- A process initiated by the ECI to revise and verify electoral rolls.
- Aim: To ensure that the voter list is accurate, inclusive, and free from discrepancies by allowing new registration, deletions, and modifications.
Legal Basis:
- Article 326: Mandates that only Indian citizens can be registered as Voters. ECI asserted that it has the authority to require individuals to submit relevant documents to prove citizenship and eligibility under Article 326.
- Article 324 vests the ECI with the power to supervise and control the preparation of electoral rolls and conduct of Elections.
- Section 21 of the Representation of the People (RP) Act empowers the Election Commission (EC) to undertake a special revision of electoral rolls at any time, citing reasons in writing.
- Section 15 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 mandates the preparation of electoral rolls “under the superintendence, direction and control” of the ECI, Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RPA).
- Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Permit summary and intensive revisions.
However, the term “intensive” is not mentioned in the Representation of the People Act, and the rules do not define it clearly, raising questions about the statutory backing of the SIR.
Key Issues and Criticism
- Burden of Proof on Electors:
- SIR shifts the burden of proving citizenship onto all existing electors, despite their prior registration through due process.
- A complaint-based mechanism already exists to delete non-citizens, but the ECI has provided no data showing its failure due to large-scale inclusion errors. In absence of such evidence, the ECI’s claim that only SIR-based entries are authentic is unsubstantiated and legally weak.
- Weak Statutory Basis: The Representation of the People Act, 1950 makes no distinction between electors added through summary or intensive revisions. The term “intensive” is absent from the Act and lacks a clear definition even in the 1960 Rules. Thus, the legal foundation of SIR is vague, raising concerns over its legitimacy and enforceability.
- Arbitrary Privileging of 2003 Electoral Roll:
- ECI rejects EPIC as proof of citizenship but exempts electors in 2003 rolls and their children from furnishing documents, relying only on name extract. This contradiction is legally questionable, especially when no proof of house-to-house verification or deletions of illegal migrants in 2003 is provided.
- Absence of 2003 SIR guidelines in the affidavit further weakens the claim, making the preferential treatment of 2003 entries arbitrary and unverified.
- Questionable use of NRC-Based Citizenship Criteria:
- SIR 2025 applies citizenship verification norms from the CAA 2003, requiring extensive documentary proof (birth details of voter and parents). However, the constitutionality of CAA 2003 is still under Supreme Court review, and NRC, which the law envisaged, has not been implemented anywhere except Assam.
- Rules under CAA 2003 were notified even before the Act was passed, casting doubt on their legality. Even the Registrar General of India has not ordered NRC initiation.
- Hence, ECI lacks legal authority to enforce NRC-based citizenship tests via SIR in Bihar.
- Arbitrary Exclusion of Aadhaar and Ration Cards as Eligibility Documents:
- ECI rejected Aadhaar as proof of citizenship, despite voluntarily collecting Aadhaar numbers in SIR 2025 forms. This is inconsistent, especially since ECI has no statutory mandate to test citizenship.
- Ration cards were excluded citing the prevalence of forgeries, but no similar objection was raised against residence certificates, despite over 13.89 crore certificates issued in Bihar (2011-2025), far more than the state's total population.
- Transparency Concerns:
- The ECI’s counter-affidavit claims that over 90% of Bihar’s 7.89 crore electors have already submitted enumeration forms under the SIR exercise. However, the affidavit does not reveal how many of those forms were submitted with the required documents.
- It admits that forms submitted “with or without documents” will be included in the draft electoral roll, to be published on August 1, 2025. Document verification has been postponed, and scrutiny by electoral registration officers will only happen after the draft is published.
- Operational & Implementation Issues in SIR:
- Till 22 July around 21.35 lakh (2.7%) electors were yet to receive and submit their enumeration forms. As of July 24, around 7 lakh electors (0.9%) had not submitted enumeration forms.
- Major political parties of Bihar were requested by the ECI to connect with the remaining electors, through their functionaries and booth level agents.
- Inability of the ECI in ensuring 100 % coverage through its own machinery of booth level officers (BLOs) and volunteers further exposes the impracticality of the SIR schedule.
- Unverified Mass Exclusions:
- Over 53 lakh electors (6.7%) were not found at their addresses, including 21.6 lakh deceased and 31.5 lakh migrated voters.
- The absence of constituency-wise data and pending verification raises concerns about error-prone deletions that may disproportionately affect certain demographics and constituencies.