The logistical impossibility of reaching out to 80 million voters through house-to-house enumeration within one month is something that would strike everyone at first sight. But what makes the SIR truly sinister is the conspiratorial manner of its announcement, and its terms that are different from every previous electoral roll revision exercise conducted by the ECI during the last seven decades. The preparatory process for the Bihar elections has been underway since early this year with the ECI even holding a major workshop in Delhi involving activists of recognised parties from all districts of Bihar. At no stage did the ECI even give a hint about conducting an intensive revision before the Assembly elections. Only a year has elapsed since the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and all that Bihar needed was an updating of the electoral roll used for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
But in the name of a Special Intensive Revision, announced on 24 June without any consultation with any political party and deemed to have been launched from the very next day, the ECI has returned to the electoral roll dated 1 January, 2003 as the foundation. Names appearing in the 2003 roll will be presumed to be correct, while all electors added subsequently will have to prove their citizenship by giving documentary evidence of their dates and places of birth, in most cases along with similar proofs for their parents as well. All these years electors only had to give an affidavit stating their citizenship while the ECI had the right to scrutinise and delete names if the claims made by applicants were found to be wrong. Now the onus is shifted to the elector to prove their citizenship. Through just one circular, the ECI has reversed the terms of electoral roll preparation that have been followed since the enactment of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 and the beginning of parliamentary democracy in India.
The ECI order explains the need for a Special Intensive Revision by invoking factors like urbanisation, migration, inclusion of new voters and possible existence of illegal voters. None of these factors can be treated as a sudden development warranting an emergency revision of the roll. Why did the ECI wait for more than two decades and then choose to go for this sudden revision just before the Bihar Assembly elections? If the ECI has reasons to doubt the integrity of the electoral roll used since 2003, how does the ECI validate the outcomes of elections conducted on the basis of flawed electoral rolls? There already exist legally laid down provisions in the election conduct rules followed by the ECI to delete names by issuing show cause notices to concerned electors and giving them time and opportunity to answer such notices. The SIR campaign of the ECI now summarily discards entire rolls of electors registered after 2003!
The sudden and arbitrary nature of the ECI's Special Intensive Revision had an uncanny resemblance to Narendra Modi's announcement of demonetisation on 8 November 2016. Indeed, the special intensive revision ordered by the ECI is akin to a devoterisation or "votebandi" campaign, whereby the current voter list will be junked and a new electoral roll will be drawn up on the basis of documents collected in the course of just one month. It is the responsibility of the state to register every birth and death. Yet we know that a large number of births still go unregistered in India, especially in a state like Bihar where institutional healthcare coverage is still quite limited in rural areas. How can the ECI expect such records for common electors born a few decades ago? Documents like land ownership records and school leaving certificates are also quite rare in a state like Bihar where the incidence of landlessness is very high, and going by the caste survey report tabled in November 2023, only about 15% of people have cleared matriculation examinationsIn many ways, the SIR seems to be akin to the traumatic National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise conducted in Assam a few years ago. The Supreme Court monitored exercise took six years in Assam to cover 33 million applicants, where nearly 2 million applicants failed to furnish necessary documents. While the undocumented citizens and those whose documents were not accepted have since been living in a state of anxiety, harassment and insecurity, the Assam government is not even ready to consider the final NRC list as a conclusive record of citizenship. The Himanta Biswa Sarma government claims it has powers to 'push back' any individual or family on sheer suspicion of being foreign nationals even if they have cleared the NRC test in Assam. Recently we have seen cases of Indian citizens being returned to India by Bangladesh after such a 'pushback' operation.
The only difference between the NRC in Assam and the SIR or undeclared NRC in Bihar is that Bihar has a cut-off date of 1 January 2003 while Assam had a much earlier cut-off date - 24 March, 1971. But what happened in Assam over a period of six years is being sought to be done in Bihar, which is more than double in population size, in a period of just three months: one month for the preparation of the draft rolls and two months for finalisation of the same. Only time will tell us how many electors will be eliminated and disenfranchised in the process. The Constitution introduced universal adult franchise in India - without any educational, social or economic discrimination among electors. This has been one of the most basic rights that distinguished citizens of modern India from the colonial and feudal past. Even when we had to fight hard in Bihar to make this universal adult franchise a reality for the oppressed poor, the de jure right of these citizens to vote was never in question. By putting this most basic right in jeopardy, the SIR threatens to pave the way for largescale exclusion of disenfranchised voters from a whole range of other rights and benefits from livelihood and social security to reservation in the spheres of education and employment.
It is a cruel irony of history that the SIR has been launched on 25 June 2025, the 50th anniversary of the promulgation of Emergency, now rechristened as the Constitution Murder Day by the Modi government. By endangering the most fundamental right of the common people of Bihar, the Election Commission handpicked by the Modi government seems to have just delivered the biggest blow to the already embattled Constitution in our beleaguered republic in its 75th anniversary. And the EC has made it clear that the SIR will be conducted across the country in the coming months. The whole country must therefore join Bihar in opposing this sinister SIR drive and protecting the Bihar elections and the Constitution from this fierce attack. Elections must be held on the basis of a normal updating of the electoral roll and not this dubious Special Intensive Revision. Bihar must not be allowed to be turned into a laboratory for a wholesale robbery of universal adult franchise, the cornerstone of India's democratic republic.
