The Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday to uphold the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls as “an advancement towards free and fair elections” has come after the exercise was already completed in Bihar and carried out in 12 other States and Union Territories in phase 2. For months, the Court had not ruled on the constitutional validity of the exercise in Association for Democratic Reforms vs ECI, and instead dealt mainly with administrative and procedural issues. By then, the impact of the SIR was already visible: electoral rolls had been reduced by more than 10%, nearly 6.5 crore names had been deleted, and several States showed an unexplained decline in the gender ratio of the rolls, with Tamil Nadu emerging as an exception.
The article argues that the process was especially damaging in West Bengal, where flaws in the SIR allegedly led to arbitrary deletions and the systematic exclusion of minorities and the underprivileged. It says statistical exercises suggest these deletions affected election outcomes in multiple constituencies. Until Wednesday, the Court’s role was largely supervisory. Its latest judgment, the article says, effectively amounts to a retrospective validation of a process that had already produced significant changes on the ground.
The Court has now answered the central constitutional question: whether the SIR was proportionate and whether it avoided arbitrary exclusion. But according to the article, it did not adequately address how the process worked in practice. The Court accepted the Election Commission’s interpretation of Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, saying the word “any” in the provision could not be limited to “only” targeted revisions, and that a broad, State-wide revision was justified by systemic migration and voter churn. However, the article says this reasoning ignored the fact that Section 21(3) is an exceptional power and does not carry the “prescribed manner” safeguard that applies to routine roll revisions.
The article also criticizes the Court’s treatment of the burden placed on voters. Petitioners had argued that asking crores of already-enrolled electors to prove their eligibility again reverses the normal presumption that registered voters are validly enrolled. The Court distinguished between “adjudicatory” and “inquisitorial” processes, saying the usual presumption does not apply in the latter. It also limited the relevance of the 1995 Lal Babu Hussein ruling, which had emphasized that removals from voter rolls must be reasoned and individualized. But the article says this distinction is unconvincing because the SIR effectively forces voters to prove a right they already possess.
While agreeing that accurate electoral rolls are essential to genuine elections, the article concludes that the wrongful deletion of eligible voters through a rushed, election-driven process poses a serious threat to electoral integrity.
