SIR’s exclusion of citizens is made possible by complicity of institutions

Why in the News

Tribunals in West Bengal are struggling to handle the caseload thrown up by the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and every State running the exercise is reporting rising numbers of electors marked “absent”, “shifted”, “dead” and “duplicate”. The Supreme Court settled the legal question in Association for Democratic Reforms and Others v. Election Commission of India and Others (May 2026). That ruling upheld the Election Commission of India’s power to conduct the revision. It also recorded the Court’s satisfaction with the procedure the Commission adopted, holding the deletions to be within the parameters of that procedure. The contest is now over whether a constitutional court that declines to scrutinise an electoral authority is protecting institutional autonomy or removing the only check available to an elector who has been struck off.

What is the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls?

1. A house to house verification, not a paper update: SIR is a time bound enumeration of the whole roll. Booth Level Officers physically visit every household to verify each entry on it.
2. It differs from the routine revision: The annual Summary Revision works off claims and objections filed by electors. SIR re-verifies every single existing entry.
3. Its stated objects: It removes deceased, duplicate and permanently shifted entries, registers newly eligible electors, and extends high security Electors Photo Identity Cards to full coverage.
4. It is periodic, not novel: Intensive revisions were first run between 1952 and 1956, and India has conducted roughly fourteen such exercises, including those of 1983, 1995, 2002 and 2004.

What did the Court actually hold in the SIR case?

1. The power was affirmed: The judgment upholds the Commission’s authority to conduct an intensive revision of the rolls.
2. The procedure was endorsed: The Court recorded its satisfaction with the procedure the Commission adopted, rather than testing that procedure against outcomes.
3. The deletions were validated collectively: Deletions were held to fall within the parameters of the approved procedure, which forecloses an individual challenge on the ground that the procedure itself is defective.

Which of the two available approaches did the Court choose?

1. The first option was structured suspicion: The Court could have adopted scepticism towards the Commission’s claims of authority, on the view that judicial vigilance is needed to hold the balance between asserted state power and citizens’ rights.
2. The second option was institutional trust: It could instead repose trust in another constitutional authority, on the assumption that constitutional institutions are themselves sufficiently committed to protecting citizens’ rights, making intensive scrutiny unnecessary.
3. It took the second: The judgment rests on the premise that a constitutional body does not need to be watched, which is precisely the premise a rights challenge exists to test.
4. Rights are lost by practice, not only by intent: An authority can undermine citizens’ rights without any explicit intention to do so, simply through unreasonable practices applied at scale.
5. Trust tests motive, scrutiny tests effect: A court satisfied that a body means well never reaches the question of what the body’s method actually produces on the ground.
6. The error is not isolated: It sits inside a broader contemporary judicial tendency that increasingly privileges “authority” over the citizen asserting a right against it.

How does the ruling fail the principle of representation?

1. Representation was the missing anchor: The judgment is not anchored in the foundational principle underlying the controversy, which is representation, so the logic of representation did not inform how the Commission’s authority was read.
2. Inclusion is now a defining requirement of citizenship: As democracy has evolved and the idea of citizenship has expanded, full inclusion has become one of its central requirements.
3. The requirement runs in two directions: Citizenship must not be denied or diminished on grounds such as sex, religion, race, caste or class, and political representation is not meaningful if citizens are effectively disabled from participating in elections as voters.
4. The arithmetic follows: Leaving eligible electors out of an election inevitably produces flawed representation, whatever the quality of the procedure that excluded them.

Can a power to purify the rolls be exercised without becoming a power to exclude?

1. The power was accepted without its limit: Having accepted that the Commission may prepare rolls and examine whether a person is genuinely entitled to be on them, the Court did not ensure that this power of scrutiny stops short of excluding or harassing eligible voters.
2. The default duty runs the other way: In a democratic election the Commission’s first responsibility is to include, not to exclude, and a verification drive inverts that default by design.
3. The Commission was not seized of inclusion: Nothing in the record shows the Commission asking whether its verification drive keeps eligible electors on the roll.
4. The instrument turns on its purpose: Without a stated inclusion duty, the revision becomes a hatchet rather than a purifying procedure.

Who bears the cost of a documentation based test of eligibility?

1. Exclusion is not random in practice: The state’s exclusion operates randomly as a general rule, but a documentation regime used as evidence of citizenship does not fall evenly.
2. The exposed groups are identifiable in advance: Vast numbers of women, the poor and the marginalised are particularly vulnerable to being trapped by such regimes, both as a matter of theory and as an empirical reality.
3. The democratic cost is the endpoint: A disproportionate exclusion of these groups undermines democratic representation itself, not merely the individual entitlements of those removed.

What happens to a citizen after the name is deleted?

1. The verdict routes deletions to the executive: It directs the Commission to report to the Home Ministry the names of persons whose entries have been deleted, for further adjudication of their claims.
2. The exercise acquires a second use: That direction allows the Commission and the government to weaponise the revision, pushing individuals into a zone of doubt, suspicion and harassment.
3. A cautious judgment produced an expansive institution: A ruling anxious not to enter the Commission’s domain has obliquely enabled the Commission to transcend that domain and become enmeshed with executive authority.
4. The consequences run past the vote: The exercise may end by creating a class of shifted, absent and duplicate persons pushed to the margins of formal existence, with passports and claims to welfare schemes also cast into doubt.

Challenges to the Special Intensive Revision

1. Booth level staff are set impossible targets: Verification of every entry within a compressed window is loaded onto officers who already hold full time teaching or clerical posts. Eg. Booth Level Officers in West Bengal reported acute duty stress during the current cycle, including cases of suicide. Fix. Cap the number of entries assigned per officer per day and pay a separate verification honorarium tied to that cap.
2. Legacy document requirements exclude the undocumented: Asking for a birth certificate or an ancestral roll entry disqualifies people whose births were never registered. Eg. Civil registration of births was far from universal in the birth cohorts now in their fifties and sixties. Fix. Accept a widened evidence set including electricity bills, ration cards and community certificates, with a declaration by the Booth Level Officer as a residual proof.
3. Grievance redress does not keep pace with deletions: Claims and objections pile up faster than hearing officers can dispose of them, so the roll freezes with the disputes unresolved. Eg. Only a fraction of the roughly six million claims filed in West Bengal were disposed of before the poll freeze. Fix. Constitute standing appellate tribunals for electoral rolls that sit year round rather than temporary benches raised at revision time.
4. Field marking is subjective: A single officer decides on one visit whether an elector is “shifted” or “absent”, with no second visit and no corroboration requirement. Eg. Households locked at the time of a daytime visit are routinely marked absent. Fix. Mandate geotagged evidence of at least two visits at different times of day before any absence marking is recorded.
5. Manual capture introduces avoidable error: Offline field data is later keyed into the database by hand, so transcription mistakes enter the roll after verification has finished. Eg. Name and age mismatches between the field form and the uploaded entry are a recurring source of objections. Fix. Issue tablets with offline forms that sync directly, removing the separate data entry step.
6. Fear of a citizenship screen suppresses cooperation: Residents who read the exercise as a covert citizenship test refuse to produce documents, which raises the very deletion risk they fear. Eg. Households in border districts have declined to hand over papers during roll verification. Fix. Print on the enumeration form itself that the exercise determines electoral registration only and creates no finding on nationality.

Conclusion

The exclusions now surfacing across States are not an administrative accident sitting downstream of a sound legal position. They follow from the judicial choice set out above, and from the direction routing deleted names to the executive for further adjudication. What remains unresolved is whether a court will accept that a power to verify carries a matching duty to include, because until it does, the elector who is struck off has a procedure to follow and no forum that will ask whether the procedure was reasonable.

“[2024, GS2, 10 marks] Examine the need for electoral reforms as suggested by various committees with particular reference to “one nation-one election” principle.”