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The great electoral purge: Why the SC must strike down Bihar’s voter verification drive | The Leaflet

Law and Citizenship Governance and Policy Supreme Court Opinion

The great electoral purge: Why the SC must strike down Bihar’s voter verification drive

What was conceived as an exercise in electoral roll maintenance has morphed into a miniature NRC, with all its attendant dangers, minus even the fig leaf of safeguards.

Jhuma Sen

Published on: 4 August 2025, 12:58 pm

The great electoral purge: Why the SC must strike down Bihar’s voter verification drive

IN THE NAME OF “PURIFYING” the electoral rolls, the Election Commission of India (‘ECI’) has launched a bureaucratic assault on the right to vote in Bihar. The ongoing Special Intensive Revision (‘SIR’), now under challenge before the Supreme Court in Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI, risks disenfranchising lakhs of genuine voters; many of them poor, Dalit, tribal, or migrant, through a maze of impossible documentation requirements and arbitrary state suspicion. If allowed to stand, this exercise will not only gut India’s constitutional commitment to universal suffrage, but also recast the very meaning of citizenship as a conditional privilege contingent on paperwork, rather than a constitutional guarantee.

On June 24, 2025, the ECI issued an order directing a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, just months before the upcoming Assembly elections. Citing its powers under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, the Commission declared that voters not on the 2003 electoral rolls must now furnish documentary proof, not only of their own citizenship, but also of their parents’. A fresh “Enumeration Form” (not prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960) was introduced, and Aadhaar and ration cards were explicitly excluded as valid proof. It may very well be stated that Article 324 does not empower the Commission to override statutory safeguards under the RPA and the 1960 Rules. Any executive action must remain within the four corners of the statute.

In A.C. Jose v. Sivan Pillai (1984), the Supreme Court made clear that the ECI’s plenary powers cannot contravene laws enacted by Parliament. The SIR framework, by requiring parental citizenship documents and bypassing the forms and processes laid out in the Rules, subverts this fundamental separation of powers.

More egregiously, the ECI’s process circumvents the statutory rules that govern voter registration. Rules 8 and 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, envisage house-to-house verification through Booth Level Officers (‘BLOs’), not a documentation-heavy process that shifts the burden to the citizen. Instead of enumerating voters, the ECI is now interrogating them, through new forms, self-declarations, and parental documents. This shift is not only unauthorised but structurally discriminatory. As data shows, Bihar has historically had low birth registration and low possession of official IDs, particularly among marginalised communities. These are the very people now at risk of being erased from the rolls.

The Bihar SIR fails every limb of a constitutional test

The Supreme Court, in its landmark judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2018), laid down the proportionality test for any executive action impinging on fundamental rights: there must be a legitimate aim, a rational nexus, the least restrictive means, and overall proportionality. The Bihar SIR fails every limb of that test. The goal of electoral integrity cannot be achieved by stripping citizens of their rights, particularly when existing summary revision mechanisms already allow for deletion of dead or duplicate voters through due process.

This is not simply an administrative overreach; it is a constitutional subversion.

In form, the Bihar SIR is a voter verification exercise. In substance, it is an act of disenfranchisement. It strikes at the heart of Article 326, which enshrines universal adult suffrage, and undermines the basic structure of the Constitution, which rests on popular sovereignty. It has already sown confusion, panic, and exclusion across Bihar’s villages. BLOs lack clarity, voters are in the dark, and the timelines are impossible. A state with one of the highest migration rates is being asked to furnish residency-based proofs, even as its working population toils outside state borders.

In form, the Bihar SIR is a voter verification exercise. In substance, it is an act of disenfranchisement.