SIR violates promise made by Constituent Assembly

Why in the News

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is being challenged as a constitutionally and legally flawed exercise that operates as an exclusion rather than a revision, on the ground that 13 crore citizens stand removed from the rolls. The argument rests on Article 326, on Article 14, and on the safeguards in Sections 16, 21 and 22 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which permit deletion only after inquiry and a hearing. The Supreme Court endorsed the exercise by its 27 May decision, and that endorsement is itself contested. The tension is between an electoral authority’s power to purify the roll and the citizen’s constitutional entitlement to remain on it until disqualified on a stated ground.

What is the Special Intensive Revision?

1. The exercise: SIR is a focused, time bound house to house enumeration in which Booth Level Officers physically visit households to verify every entry on the electoral roll.
2. How it differs from the annual exercise: The routine summary revision updates the roll on the basis of claims received. SIR verifies each existing entry through door to door checking.
3. What it is meant to remove: Its stated objectives are to confirm the residence of every registered voter, to remove deceased, duplicate and permanently shifted entries, and to register citizens who have newly turned 18.

What is the constitutional entitlement the exercise is measured against?

1. Adult suffrage is the constitutional foundation: Under Article 326, every person who is a citizen of India and not less than 21 years of age, now 18, is entitled to be registered as a voter.
2. The grounds of exclusion are closed: Article 326 permits disqualification only on grounds of non residence, unsoundness of mind, crime or illegal practice, under the Constitution or a law made by the legislature.
3. Voting is therefore not merely statutory: A right whose grounds of denial are fixed by the Constitution itself is not a right that an administrative process may extinguish.
4. Equality applies to the process, not only the outcome: Equality guaranteed to “any person” under Article 14 makes an arbitrary and discriminatory exercise open to challenge, since those removed were electors already on the roll as per law.

Which statutory safeguards are said to have been bypassed?

1. The roll must be prepared under the Act: Part III of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 governs preparation of the electoral roll, and the Election Commission of India (ECI) must prepare it in accordance with that Act.
2. Section 16 fixes the disqualifications: It bars registration where a person is not a citizen of India, is of unsound mind, or is disqualified for corrupt or other practices.
3. Section 21 keys revision to the Census: Revision of rolls proceeds on the existing Census, the last available being that of 2011.
4. Section 22 requires inquiry before deletion: The Electoral Registration Officer may correct an entry only if satisfied after such inquiry as he thinks fit, and only on finding the entry erroneous or defective.
5. A hearing precedes removal: Section 22 gives the person the right to be heard before deletion, and deletion is available where a person is dead or has ceased to be a resident of the constituency.

What is the claimed scale of exclusion, and who carries its cost?

1. The headline number: 13 crore citizens are stated to have been excluded from the rolls.
2. Two States account for a large share: 48 lakh electors were removed in Delhi and 2 crore in Maharashtra.
3. The burden has shifted to the citizen: Booth Level Officers deleted names and the ECI put up lists, leaving the excluded person to establish the claim rather than the authority to establish the ground.
4. Citizenship is not a plausible explanation: The ECI cannot maintain that 13 crore people are foreigners when they were not identified as non citizens over more than a decade.
5. Exclusion travels beyond the ballot: Loss of entitlements such as passports, ration cards, free rations and other benefits follows from the uncertainty over status.
6. Two elections have already been held: Elections to the Bihar and West Bengal assemblies took place in the interim, and the effect of the exclusions on those outcomes can be ascertained only by experts.

What did the Constituent Assembly settle about the franchise?

1. The question was debated directly: The Constituent Assembly took up the integrity of elections on 15 and 16 June 1949.
2. Fairness was treated as beyond argument: R K Sidhwa said he did not think there were two opinions that elections should be fair, pure, honest and impartial.
3. Corruption was not assumed to be a candidate’s monopoly: K M Munshi said the sovereign people must be able to elect their representatives in a manner above suspicion, and that corrupt practices may be committed by the government.
4. Exclusion by official discretion was ruled out: B R Ambedkar said franchise is a most fundamental thing in a democracy, and no person entitled to be brought onto the rolls should be excluded merely by the prejudice of a local government or the whim of an officer.

Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

1. Documentary proof falls hardest on those least likely to hold it: Requiring legacy documents or a birth certificate excludes citizens whose lives were never recorded in formal registers. Eg. Landless labourers and migrant workers frequently hold no document tying them to a single constituency.
   The Fix: Accept a wider range of residency proofs, including utility bills and community certificates, so absence of a specific document is not treated as absence of entitlement.
2. Grievance redressal runs slower than the deletion it answers: Claims and objections are filed against a deadline the roll itself is racing, so an unresolved claim becomes a deletion by default. Eg. Only a fraction of about 60 lakh claims in West Bengal were resolved before the roll was frozen for polling.
   The Fix: Establish year round appellate tribunals for electoral rolls, so a claim is not extinguished by an election calendar.
3. Field verification carries unreviewable discretion: A Booth Level Officer’s judgement that a household has shifted is recorded without a stated ground and is rarely revisited. Eg. Entries are marked “shifted” on a single visit at which no member of the household was present.
   The Fix: Require geo tagged verification with a recorded reason for each adverse marking, so an official decision is traceable to a place and a date.
4. Fear of a citizenship test suppresses cooperation: Households that read the exercise as a screening of nationality withhold documents, which itself produces the deletion they feared. Eg. Residents in border districts have declined to submit papers on the view that the exercise is a stealth register of citizens.
   The Fix: State in the enumeration form itself that the exercise determines registration alone and creates no finding on citizenship.

Conclusion

The exercise and the Constitution are answering two different questions. The ECI is asking who can prove entitlement, and Article 326 asks who can be disqualified on a stated ground; those are not the same test. Until that is resolved, an administrative default operates as a disqualification the Constitution does not list. The marker to watch is whether the deletion process is required to record a ground and a hearing for each name, since that is where a revision separates from an exclusion.

What is the current status of the right to vote in India?

1. The age threshold: Universal adult suffrage applies at 18, lowered from 21 by the Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1988.
2. The right is exercised through registration: Section 19 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 conditions registration on being 18 or above and ordinarily resident in the constituency.
3. Its legal character is settled: The right to vote is a constitutional and statutory right rather than a fundamental right, so it is enforced through the electoral law rather than under Article 32.
4. Two categories sit outside the ordinary rule: Section 20A provides for overseas electors to be registered, and proxy voting is confined to classified service voters such as members of the armed and paramilitary forces.

Constitutional Provisions Related to Elections and Electoral Rolls

1. Article 324: Vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections to Parliament, the State legislatures and the offices of President and Vice-President in the ECI.
2. Article 325: Mandates one general electoral roll for every constituency, and bars exclusion on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
3. Article 327: Empowers Parliament to make laws on all matters relating to elections, which is the source of the Representation of the People Acts.
4. Article 328: Empowers a State legislature to make election laws where Parliament has not provided for the matter.
5. Article 329: Bars courts from interfering in electoral matters such as delimitation, except through an election petition.

Major debates surrounding electoral roll revision

1. The character of the right: Whether the right to vote should be read as a facet of Article 21 and Article 19(1)(a) rather than as a purely statutory entitlement remains contested in litigation.
2. Whether the ECI may test citizenship: Article 324 confers plenary superintendence, and the question is whether that extends to determining nationality, which is otherwise decided under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and by tribunals.
3. Where the burden of proof sits: One position treats an existing entry as presumptively valid until disproved, and the other treats every entry as unverified until re-established.
4. The judicial review bar: Article 329(b) limits challenges once the election process has begun, which pushes disputes over the roll into the narrow window before notification.
5. Timing relative to polls: An intensive revision immediately preceding an election compresses the claims and objections period, and whether such an exercise should be barred within a fixed period before polling is unsettled.

Laws and Rules Governing Electoral Rolls

1. Representation of the People Act, 1951: Governs the actual conduct of elections, the qualifications and disqualifications of candidates, corrupt practices and election petitions.
2. Sections 80 and 81: An election may be questioned only by an election petition filed in the High Court within 45 days.
3. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960: Lays down the procedural framework for house to house enumeration and verification, and is the subordinate legislation an intensive revision is conducted under.
4. Section 31, Representation of the People Act, 1950: Penalises false declarations made in connection with electoral rolls.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2017] Right to vote and to be elected in India is a (a) Fundamental Right (b) Natural Right (c) Constitutional Right (d) Legal Right ANSWER: (c)”