A tsunami of allegations and counter-allegations has erupted in the mess involving the final electoral rolls in Bihar after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). Doubts have also been cast on the ECI’s integrity and non-partisanship. The whole exercise has raised serious concerns about our electoral system and about the threat to our democracy itself.
With the prospect of the SIR being repeated in all states very soon, it is time for citizens all over the country to wake up to the possible hazards of their names being deleted, going missing, duplicated or shown under fake addresses, and so on, which has been the bane of the draft and final electoral rolls in Bihar, despite supposed attempts to cleanse them.
Ignoring the many errors in the draft electoral rolls published on August 1, 2025, the ECI issued a press note on August 16 putting the full onus of detecting errors on political parties and electors. Apparently EROs would take note of errors only if someone complained about them. Thus, the ECI appeared to be claiming that it – as well as its officials – have no accountability in case of duplicate entries, wrong entries, ineligible entries, etc. The Electoral Registration Officers (EROs) themselves do not need to even notice, for instance, that the same voter’s name with photo has been printed on a single page five times even as they sign off on each roll.
Prominent Right to Information (RTI) activist and director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), Venkatesh Nayak, had filed two RTI queries with the ECI seeking to know which legal provisions fix accountability of election officials for including ineligible voters, including suspected foreign nationals, in the voters’ list and against whom legal action had been initiated since 2015.
The reply he received claimed that no information was available on past cases of punishment for officials despite the lakhs of errors plaguing the electoral rolls. This, when Section 32 (1) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951, says that if any ERO, AERO, or any other person is guilty of any act of omission or commission, they shall be punishable with imprisonment of not less than three months. So, against how many EROs and AEROs in Bihar will the ECI take action, now that even the final SIR has revealed massive errors? Or will political parties be again blamed for it?
An investigation by The Reporters’ Collective just before the publication of the final rolls in Bihar also revealed a shocking attempt by the PA of a sitting MLA to get nearly 80,000 names deleted by submitting Form 7 applications, on the ground that the names listed – belonging mostly to a minority community – were those of non-citizens. The investigation found that several of those listed were genuine citizens, including a Gram Panchayat president and his family members. So, will the ERO of the constituency file FIRs against the individual concerned for filing false Form 7s, as the ERO of Aland constituency in Karnataka’s Kalaburgi had done in a similar case?
A Reporters’ Collective’s analysis of the finalised voter rolls of Bihar’s 243 Assembly constituencies found widespread errors. These include more than 14.35 lakh suspect duplicate voters and around 1.32 crore voters registered at dubious and non-existent addresses with voters from different families, castes, and communities wrongfully clubbed together. This, despite India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar claiming that the list was now “purified” after completion of the SIR. This could not have happened if the ECI and its army of ground staff had actually carried out the door-to-door verification of voters and their records, as the ECI claims to have done, says the report.
The Bihar SIR required voters to submit any of 11 documents – such as birth certificate, passport, matriculation certificate and not the usual Aadhaar card, PAN card, or voter ID – to determine one’s eligibility to be a voter and indirectly determine citizenship. But studies have revealed that only 2.5% of Indians have passports and just 14.71% have matriculation certificates. Obtaining birth certificates was not mandatory until a few years ago. Hence, it appears irrational to demand that a voter should produce these documents when the ECI’s own data, which it presented in court, shows that most Indians do not have these documents and hence would not be able to produce them. The implicit result would be that a person will be declared a non-citizen ineligible to vote because they did not produce the documents asked for.
The final rolls in Bihar also showed that out of 68 lakh deletions, only a negligible fraction, if any, were removed on the basis of foreign nationality. According to reports, more than 99% of the 68.66 lakh total deletions (across draft and final rolls) were due to death, migration or duplication. So, what was the justification for this exercise as a citizenship verification drive? Thus, a mere 1%, or 68,660 out of 68.66 lakh deletions, were likely to have been illegal immigrants. This figure is less than 0.1% of the total electorate of 7.42 crore voters. So, was this whole bureaucratic exercise, which put tremendous pressure on the entire voting population, worth it if it ended up identifying not even 0.1% as likely illegals?
If only a mere 0.1% residents are likely to be undocumented immigrants, as evidenced in Bihar, is there any logic in this retrospective SIR exercise being conducted country-wide and harassing 96.88 crore citizens? Isn’t this reminiscent of the disastrous exercise of demonetisation which brought 99% of the cash back into the system?
The ECI by demanding that citizens prove their citizenship retrospectively when it knows that crore of voters cannot do so has merely created a humongous and futile bureaucratic exercise that will only disenfranchise lakhs or crores of genuine citizens when the SIR is extended to the entire country and create a crisis that the country’s democracy will be unable to surmount.
After all, migrants from neighbouring countries have been coming to this country in search of livelihood or other reasons for centuries, and there is a civilisational history of this land accepting and assimilating them. Hence, if there have been many illegal migrants whom the state failed to identify while they entered, the effort to identify them now should not end up disenfranchising genuine citizens. Should the exercise rather be to introduce a prospective, foolproof system of having a clean and accurate database of citizens?
Kathyayini Chamaraj is the executive trustee of CIVIC-Bangalore and a Karnataka state coordinator of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR). Views expressed are the author’s own.