The Election Commission of India (ECI), despite a case still pending in the Supreme Court and despite strong opposition from political parties and conscious citizens, has announced a nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists. The Commission, boasting that it has already completed this process successfully in Bihar, has now announced the schedule for the second phase of the SIR. As the exercise starts from Tuesday, November 4, in 12 states, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and other parties of the INDIA bloc have decided to approach the SC against it. In the remaining states, the SIR may be conducted anytime after February next year.
The constitutional validity of the SIR process and the ECI’s authority to conduct the SIR are still being heard in the Supreme Court. Yet, the ECI has gone ahead and announced a nationwide SIR — misusing the powers granted to it under the Constitution.
Before the Supreme Court decides on the SIR’s constitutional legitimacy, and before the 2026 national census, the ECI seems eager to use the SIR — a disguised National Register of Citizens (NRC) — to deny citizenship to the poor and minorities.
SIR – Shifting onus and suspecting citizenship
That the SIR is the Modi government’s ingenious method to exclude the poor and the minorities has been amply demonstrated in the way the government failed to defend itself in the SC.
First and foremost, according to the Representation of the People Act and the Rules framed later, the inclusion of eligible voters into the voter list is the responsibility of the ECI and not the voters. The earlier Special Revisions and Intensive Revisions used to do the same. Though Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar keeps recounting that the last SIR was done in 2003, the guidelines issued in 2003 called it a ‘Special Revision of Intensive Nature’ and under this exercise, the enumerators would go in search of eligible voters in each house and enlist them. Thus, the responsibility of the inclusion of the eligible people was with the Commission.
The rules said that enumerators must visit houses and “must fill in the appropriate boxes in all cases”.
But in the SIR, for the first time, the responsibility of inclusion in the voter list has been transferred to voters. Even in the recently modified rules for the 12 states, this remains the same, where voters have been asked to fill a form and submit it within a specified time along with documents if necessary, failing which they would be excluded from the voter list. The Booth Level Officers have to visit houses, but the onus is still heavily on the voter.
The 2003 guidelines said, “It is not the job of the enumerator to determine the citizenship of an individual. However, they have the power and responsibility to exclude any person on the basis of the qualification for registration regarding age or ordinary residence. Age can be verified with reference to, but not restricted to the birth certificate, school or college certificate, passport, wherever available, baptism certificate, etc.”
This time however, the ECI tests the citizenship status of each voter and adjudicates based on that instead of one’s voter status. The rules say, “Electoral Registration Officers or EROs will refer cases of suspected foreign nationals to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955. For these purposes, AERO shall exercise ERO's powers independently u/s 13C(2) of the RPA, 1950.”
While in 2003 the citizenship test applied to new voters in areas with substantial presence of foreign nationals or voters whose links with existing voters could not be established. In the new SIR, the citizenship test would apply to all including those who have voted multiple times.
What transpired in Bihar
In June, as Bihar was preparing for Assembly elections, the ECI suddenly announced the SIR — ostensibly to remove illegal immigrants from the voter list. Under the leadership of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, the ECI made it mandatory for every citizen to produce one of 11 specified documents; failure to do so resulted in denial of citizenship and deletion from the electoral roll.
The ECI even refused to accept commonly available documents such as ration card, Aadhaar card, and voter ID – which is issued by the ECI itself – as valid proof. Instead, it demanded documents like birth certificate, property papers, matriculation certificate, etc — none of which were available to over 30 million poor Biharis. As a result, over 30 million legitimate Indian citizens in the state — not illegal immigrants — stood to lose their citizenship.
People’s organisations and opposition parties immediately launched protests and approached the Supreme Court. The Modi government tried to justify its intent in multiple ways, but after activists and lawyers presented evidence of the harmful consequences of the process, the Supreme Court intervened and directed that the Aadhaar card must also be accepted for voter identification. Had the Supreme Court not done so, the Modi government would have rendered 20-30 million poor, illiterate, and minority Biharis stateless.
Even so, due to the anti-poor and irrational nature of the SIR process, over 6.5 million legitimate Bihari citizens have already been excluded from the voter list. Shockingly, while fewer than 500 “illegal immigrants” were identified, 6.5 million poor Indians were disenfranchised.
ECI has no mandate to conduct SIR
Under Articles 324, 325, and 326 of the Indian Constitution, the ECI’s duty is to conduct elections and ensure that every Indian citizen aged 18 and above has the right to vote. According to Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the 1960 Election Rules, the Commission must prepare the electoral rolls, removing names of ineligible, deceased, or relocated persons.
To keep voter rolls updated, the ECI conducts two regular processes:
Summary Revision (SR) — typically before elections
Intensive Revision (IR) — periodically, independent of elections
However, there is no mention of any Special Intensive Revision in the 1960 Rules. Only SR and IR are recognised. Despite this, the ECI claimed before the Supreme Court that an SIR had been conducted in Bihar in 2003. When asked to produce evidence, it replied that the records had been “lost.”
Even while announcing the SIR in 12 states recently, the ECI falsely claimed that SIR had been conducted multiple times between 1951 and 2003–04.
What is the difference between SIR and SR/IR?
In SR:
- The existing electoral roll is used as a reference.
- Only those who newly qualify (i.e., turned 18 after the last election) are added.
- Deaths and relocations are updated.
- The burden of inclusion in the electoral rolls lies with the election officials — not the voter.
In IR:
- Conducted periodically, not under election pressure.
- Officials verify the physical existence of voters through field visits.
In SIR:
- The process forces citizens to prove their citizenship using documents, making it a backdoor NRC.
- It excludes those who lack certain documents.
- The burden of inclusion in the voter list lies with the voter and not ECI.
- The ECI’s prescribed proof conditions are similar to NRC requirements:
a) Those born before 1987 must prove date and place of birth.
b) Those born between 1987–2004 must prove one parent is Indian.
c) Those born after 2004 must prove both parents are Indian.
These are not voter eligibility conditions, but citizenship verification conditions — NRC conditions.
The ECI listed 11 documents as proof, including birth certificates, matriculation records, government employment ID, passport, and property papers — excluding ration card, Aadhaar, and voter ID (though Aadhaar was reluctantly added after Supreme Court intervention).
As we saw in Bihar, this led to the disenfranchisement of 6.5 million poor citizens, mostly women, Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities.
The Lal Babu Hussein case and SC guidelines
In 1995, a three-judge bench of the SC headed by then Chief Justice of India Justice AM Ahmadi, in a case famously known as ‘Lal Babu Hussein and Others vs Electoral Registration Officer and others’, had given clear guidelines to prohibit the ECI from arbitrary citizenship tests.
The petitioners, mainly belonging to the Muslim community and hailing from slums, had questioned the constitutionality of the ERO’s authority to test their citizenship and arbitrarily disqualify voters based on local police reports alone. After a detailed hearing, the SC allowed the petition and passed certain guidelines to be followed by the ECI:
- If any person whose citizenship is suspected is shown to have been included in the immediately preceding electoral roll, the ERO or any other officer inquiring into the matter shall bear in mind that the entire gamut for inclusion of the name in the electoral roll must have been undertaken and hence adequate probative value be attached to that factum before issuance of notice and in subsequent proceedings;
- The officer holding the enquiry shall bear in mind that the enquiry being quasi-judicial nature, he must entertain all such evidence, documentary or otherwise, the concerned affected person may like to tender in evidence and disclose all such material on which he proposes to place reliance, so that the concerned person has had a reasonable opportunity of rebutting such evidence. The concerned person, it must always be remembered, must have a reasonable opportunity of being heard;
- Needless to state that the officer inquiring into the matter must apply his mind independently to the material placed before him and without being influenced by extraneous considerations instructions;
- The directive issued by the Election Commission on September 9, 1994, prohibiting the officer from entertaining certain documents will stand quashed and the documents will be received, if tendered, and its evidentiary value assessed and applied in decision-making;
- These guidelines not being exhaustive, the officer concerned must, where special situations arise, conduct themselves fairly and in a manner consistent with the principles of natural justice and should not appear to be acting on any pre-conceived notions;
Thus, the three-judge bench of the SC way back in 1995 itself had seriously criticised the way the ECI had conducted itself in suspecting citizenship without due diligence and refusing to accept documents citizens provided to prove their validity as voters.
In fact, the ECI is now violating each and every guideline of the SC through the SIR, where not just the citizenship of the “suspected” is tested but the entire citizenry is arbitrarily “suspected” and their citizenship is being suspended by refusal to admit the documents that they can provide without probing into its evidentiary value, which is completely against the spirit of the Lal Babu Hussein judgement of the SC.
New NRC?
When announcing the nationwide SIR, the ECI, mindful of criticism from its Bihar experience, made a few cosmetic changes:
- Added Aadhaar as a 12th document (but only as an identity proof, not citizenship proof, which again provides ample opportunity to enumerators to refuse it as the standalone document).
- Allowed 54 days for document verification.
Nevertheless, the ECI continues with its anti-constitutional SIR process nationwide by verifying and cancelling citizenship rather than registering eligible voters nationwide.
Hence, it is clear that the SIR is an unconstitutional, disguised NRC.
In 2020, the Modi government had planned to link the NRC with the census, but mass protests forced it to withdraw the plan.
Now, before the 2026 census, the government seems to be executing NRC through the Election Commission’s SIR process, intending later to combine the census and SIR data to deny citizenship to the poor, Dalits, Adivasis, and minorities.
This reflects a neo-liberal social Darwinism — implying that the poor, the marginalised, and the uneducated are unfit for citizenship — and a Savarkarite Hindutva ideology that excludes Dalits and minorities from the notion of Indian nationhood.
Hence, SIR/NRC is unconstitutional and part of the Savarkarite–neo-liberal Brahminical Hindutva project.
With other states likely to face SIR implementation after February 2026, citizens must understand the hidden motives behind the SIR and awaken again to build a massive people’s movement — as in 2019-20 — to defeat this masked NRC called SIR.
Shivasundar is an activist and freelance journalist.
Views expressed are the author’s own.