Supreme Court upholds validity of SIR, says EC competent authority to conduct exercis
Supreme Court upholds validity of SIR, says EC competent authority to conduct exercise
M.U.H
27/05/202631
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the legal validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, also approving the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) authority to conduct the exercise.
A division bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi held the SIR exercise that commenced with Bihar last June was undertaken with the objective to ensure integrity of electoral rolls that is the foundation of India’s democratic process.
The SIR does not divest an individual’s citizenship in case of a deletion nor does it foreclose the competent authority’s power to hold an enquiry against someone whose name is included, the court said. This means the ECI can determine an individual’s citizenship, but for a limited purpose, which is to include them in the voting list.
The court said the ECI shall share the names of all those who were not included in the electoral roll for Bihar within four weeks with the competent authority that will conduct proceedings under the Citizenship Act. In case it is found that such persons are citizens, their names shall be added to the fresh voter list prepared by the ECI, it said.
With its pronouncement, the bench dismissed a batch of petitions that claimed the ECI was legally not empowered to conduct the SIR exercise, which was exclusionary in nature and without a statutory backing. The judgement disagreed with the petitioners, saying the SIR was traceable to the legal framework. It was undertaken to advance an objective, which was to maintain electoral integrity. The judgement focused on four core legal issues and approved the exercise on all the counts.
It held SIR satisfied the proportionality test, was not manifestly excessive and had sufficient safeguards, including the ones introduced by the top court over a period of time, to prevent arbitrary exclusion.
On 29 January, the bench had reserved its decision on a batch of petitions challenging the ECI’s powers. It had, however, refused to stay the SIR process and proceeded to examine if the ECI had the powers to conduct the special revision. The top court had directed the ECI to accept Aadhaar cards as identification for the purpose of inclusion in the revised voters’ list in Bihar. This was subject to the ECI verifying the authenticity and genuineness of Aadhaar cards, the court said, clarifying the document shall not be a proof of citizenship.
It had declined to interdict the SIR process, leading to its completion in Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and West Bengal. At present, SIR is on in several other states, including Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.
The Bihar beginning
Most petitions challenging the SIR were filed in June last year, following the poll panel’s declaration to conduct the exercise in Bihar, months before the Assembly elections in November 2025. Later, petitions were filed challenging SIR in the other states.
The Association of Democratic Reforms, political activist Yogendra Yadav, Members of Parliament Mahua Moitra (Trinamool), Manoj Jha (Rashtriya Janata Dal), K.C. Venugopal (Congress), Supriya Sule (Nationalist Congress Part Sharadchandra Pawar), were among the petitioners.
The legal question before the court was whether the ECI has powers under Article 324 of the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the rules made under it to conduct the SIR that aims to create electoral rolls from scratch, after a comprehensive verification of the voters on the rolls and adding new ones.
After analysing the issues pressed before it, the court carved out four legal questions for its examination.
On the first, which is whether the ECI has the power to conduct the SIR, the court, after weighing in various statutes and the constitutional provision, held the revision “breeds life into the constitutional mandate” to hold free and fair elections. It declined to accept the petitioners’ stand that the process had worked against a statute or transgressed rules and the law.
The court said the SIR can’t be struck down as ultra vires merely because the procedure adopted is different from the ordinary exercise to update the electoral roll.
The court answered in the affirmative to the question on whether there was a legitimate purpose to hold the SIR, declaring that the measures undertaken were proportionate to the object sought to be achieved. It said the safeguards adopted struck a fine balance on the need for electoral integrity and inclusion in a voter roll, and this satisfied the test of proportionality.
The third question framed by the bench was whether the SIR was contrary to the violation of the RP Act and the rules framed under it. After holding the exercise as legally tenable, the court said the steps and guidelines mandated under the SIR were well within the statutory framework.
The steps included show-cause opportunity, individualised enquiries, speaking order against rejection and the right to appeal. Even the deletions under the SIR were held to be not contrary to the rules.
The court disagreed with the petitioners that the ECI could not have created a documentary regime. It said the this was necessary to ensure consistency in the revision process, and that it suited the exigencies of the SIR. The ECI, it added, was not unbound in devising a mechanism. However, the same must conform to the statutory framework to maintain integrity of electoral rolls, which was done in the case of the SIR.
Answering the last question on the ECI’s authority to ascertain an individual’s citizenship, the court said the poll panel was empowered to scrutinise citizenship status for seeking inclusion in voter rolls, a statutory requirement under the RP Act.
“However, such an enquiry can only be made from the standpoint of determining inclusion or exclusion in the electoral roll,” the bench said. Such an enquiry, it added, must be conducted in accordance with law and within bounds of procedural fairness.
Citizenship assessment has a limited context, and if material gives rise to doubt about someone’s citizenship then the ECI is within its authority to decline inclusion, the court said. “Such action must be understood in proper perspective and does not amount to decision that he is not a citizen of India,” it clarified.
What petitioners said
During the hearing of the case, the petitioners had contended the the SIR made the ECI a de-facto authority to verify citizenship, though they did not dispute the fact that citizenship is a prerequisite for voting.
Doubts over the eligibility of a voter should be dealt with as per the process laid down under Section 16 of the RP Act, which outlines three grounds to disqualify a person from being a voter, the court said. These are: if they are not a citizen of India, of unsound mind or declared so, or disqualified from voting under any law relating to corrupt practices and offences related to elections.
Questions were also raised over the burden being shifted to the individuals to prove through specific documents that they are citizens in order to be on the voters’ list. It was emphasized that the only the Centre and Foreigners Tribunals through Sections 8 and 9 of the Citizenship Act can determine if a person is an Indian citizen or not.
Deletion of names from the electoral rolls would lead to a perilous situation for the voters whose citizenship would come under scrutiny, the petitioners argued. The ECI’s enumeration form, to be filled by voters, lacked statutory backing since the RP Act and rules does not speak about it, the court was told.
With regard to Bihar specifically, the petitioners said the process was rushed in the state that was reeling under floods. This led to disenfranchisement of many eligible voters, including religious minorities.
In its defence, the ECI took the stand that its power flowed from Article 324 of the Constitution, dealing with universal adult suffrage. The Article gives the right to vote to only citizens, and this empowers the poll body to ensure that those on the roll are indeed citizens.
Allowing non-citizens to vote would “go against the grain of the Constitution”, the poll panel had argued, claiming that in the case of Bihar there was hardly any appeal filed against the exclusions.
The ECI further submitted that verification of the citizenship status of an individual was for a limited purpose, which is to ensure that an individual meets the eligibility criterion of being on a voter. The SIR was primarily needed to weed out voters who may be dead or have shifted to another constituency, it had explained, contending the last such exercise was undertaken in 2003.
