On January 29, 2026, the Supreme Court reserved judgment in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India, challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in States across India. By the time West Bengal voted on April 23 and 29, the SIR had erased 91,02,577 names or 11.88 per cent of a 7.66 crore pre-revision electorate.
The Court’s verdict in the matter will be the judicial review of the most consequential exercise of administrative power over the electoral roll since the Constitution’s inception. Three questions demand attention: whether Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RPA) sustains a de novo reconstruction of the roll; whether the reverse burden of proof in the SIR survives Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer, (1995); and whether Article 326 confers a justiciable constitutional right of registration that the executive cannot impair save in conformity with Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21.
The RPA, 1950 contemplates two species of revision. Section 21(2) provides for periodic revision, whether “intensive”, “summary” or “partly intensive and partly summary”. Section 21(3) supplies the residuary discretion: the Commission may, “for reasons to be recorded”, direct a special revision “in such manner as it may think fit.” Rule 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 (RER, 1960) operationalises this: Rule 25(2) requires an intensive revision to be conducted as if the roll were being prepared for the first time; Rule 25(3) provides for summary revision through amendments alone.
“Special Intensive Revision” appears nowhere in the parent statute. It is an administrative hybrid the Election Commission of India (ECI) has constructed under Article 324 read with Section 21(3) and Rule 25. The Commission’s order of June 24, 2025 - originally for Bihar and extended to twelve States and Union Territories including West Bengal on October 27, 2025 - treats the 2002 roll as the legacy reference point. Electors who cannot be matched against it must produce documentary proof of eligibility. The petitioners contend that this exceeds the rulemaking power: a special revision cannot, in substance, become a de novo preparation that places the burden of re-enrolment on existing voters, because Rules 21A and 22 RER, 1960, read with the proviso to Section 22, confine deletion to disqualification, death, ordinary residence and duplication. Each ground presupposes that the State is the moving party.
The numbers are not incidental. The SIR reduced the roll from 7,66,37,529 to 6,82,51,008. Booth-level data analysed by Mint indicates that approximately 31.1 lakh, or 34.3 per cent of deletions, were Muslim voters, against a community share of roughly 27 per cent. The disproportionality widens at constituency level: in Bhabanipur, 40.1 per cent of post-adjudication deletions and 52 per cent of the “logical discrepancy” (LD) list were Muslim voters against a 20 per cent electoral share. In Nandigram, the figure rose to roughly 95 per cent.
The LD category is itself a creature for the West Bengal SIR. Generated by software that flagged voters for parental-name spelling mismatches, parent-child age-gap anomalies, or “more than six children”, it has no analogue in the Bihar or Phase-II exercises. Of roughly 60,06,675 cases routed for adjudication, 27,16,393 (45.22 per cent) were ultimately deleted. The Commission has not published the algorithmic logic of the LD classifier. A Reporters’ Collective investigation into the underlying software remains unrebutted. The constitutional difficulty is not that algorithms have been deployed in roll management; they must be. The difficulty is that an undocumented classifier has produced 1.2 to 1.36 crore ex ante suspects whose status is then resolved through proceedings notionally compliant with natural justice, but operationally driven by the algorithmic flag.
Lal Babu Hussein is the most relevant precedent. Addressing the deletion of “doubtful citizens” from rolls in erstwhile Bombay and Delhi without hearing, the Court held that an existing entry carries a presumption of validity; that the burden of proving disqualification lies on the objector or the registration officer, not on the elector; that the opportunity of being heard under the proviso to Section 22 must be “meaningful and purposive”; and that the registration officer must apply mind independently, cannot rely on police verification reports alone and must pass a speaking order. The Court quashed the ECI’s directive of September 9, 1994 to the extent it restricted the documents an elector could produce.
The SIR’s architecture inverts each of these propositions. The presumption of validity attaches not to the existing entry, but to the 2002 “reference roll”. Only 32 per cent of West Bengal voters could be matched to it, leaving 68 per cent, effectively every elector enrolled after 2002, to discharge a documentary burden. The eleven-document list, expanded to twelve only after the Court’s order of September 8, 2025 directing acceptance of Aadhaar, retains a structural preference for pre-1987 government records unavailable to the migrant poor and to Bengali-speaking refugees, including the Matua community whose post-2002 settlement makes legacy linkage impossible. Over 1.5 crore quasi-judicial citizenship-hearing notices were issued in fewer than twenty days, with registration officers signing off in volume. The procedural collapse converts the Lal Babu Hussein template into a paper exercise.
The Election Commission counters that Lal Babu Hussein addressed individualised deletion, not periodic revision; that Section 21(3) authorises a revision “in such manner as the Commission may think fit”; and that Article 324 supplies a plenary reservoir of power confirmed by Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner (1978). The argument is plausible but not immune to scrutiny: Mohinder Singh Gill itself qualifies the Article 324 power as one “exercised not arbitrarily or mala fide, and ordinarily guided by rules”.
The constitutional or statutory character of the right to vote remains unsettled. The Constitution Bench in Kuldip Nayar v. Union of India (2006) held it to be “neither a fundamental right nor a constitutional right but a pure and simple statutory right”, affirming NP Ponnuswami and Jyoti Basu v. Debi Ghosal. A parallel current has run since PUCL v. Union of India (2003), where Reddi, J, concurring, located the “freedom of voting” within Article 19(1)(a). The three-judge NOTA judgment in PUCL (2013) confirmed that Kuldip Nayar did not impliedly overrule that strand.
The most recent authority moves further. In Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India (2023), KM Joseph J observed that “the right to elect is fundamental to democracy” and that the right under Article 326 “can be said to be a constitutional right.” Ajay Rastogi J, located the right within Part III through Articles 15, 17, 19 and 21. The SIR litigation will compel the Court either to harmonise these strands or choose between them. Article 326 is unequivocal: every citizen of and above the qualifying age “shall be entitled to be registered as a voter.” If that entitlement is justiciable, the State’s power to delete an existing entry is bounded by the substantive constitutional command of registration. If not, Article 326 collapses into a statutory derivative the Commission may, under Section 21(3), reorganise at will.
A distinctive feature of the litigation is that the Court, having declined to stay the exercise, has supervised it through Article 142. Successive interim orders progressively constrained the Commission’s discretion: directing acceptance of Aadhaar, EPIC and ration card; insisting that the goal must be “mass inclusion, not en masse exclusion”; and requiring publication of district-wise booth-level lists of deleted electors with reasons. For West Bengal, the order of February 20, 2026 deployed approximately 700 judicial officers to adjudicate LD claims. On March 10, 2026, the Court constituted 19 Appellate Tribunals chaired by retired High Court judges, including former Chief Justice TS Sivagnanam, to hear deletion appeals.
Bagchi J observed that if the margin of victory in any constituency was narrow and a significant fraction of the electorate had been excluded, the Court would “apply our mind.” That hypothetical may now require operational content, given the BJP’s 207-seat victory on May 4, 2026. The regime is administratively impressive but doctrinally fragile: the Court has substituted ad hoc judicial management for the rule-bound natural justice that Lal Babu Hussein required. The risk is that a future Commission, perceiving an institutional template, treats every ex ante violation of statute as repairable through ex post supervision. That is not what Article 142 was designed for.
First, does Section 21(3) RPA, 1950, read with Rule 25 RER, 1960, empower the Commission to direct a special revision that requires existing voters to re-establish eligibility? Or does “in such manner as it may think fit” operate within the architecture of Sections 22, 23 and 24, which presuppose State-initiated deletion on enumerated grounds?
Second, does the SIR’s reverse-burden architecture survive the natural justice standard set in Lal Babu Hussein? The tribunal-and-Article-142 superstructure may rescue procedural form, but cannot rescue the inversion of the substantive presumption that an existing entry stands until the State proves disqualification.
Third, and most consequentially, is Article 326 a justiciable constitutional right the executive cannot abridge save by procedure prescribed by law and consonant with Articles 14, 19(1)(a) and 21? The trajectory from Kuldip Nayar through PUCL to Anoop Baranwal already moves toward convergence. A reasoned answer would settle six decades of doctrinal ambivalence.
The reserved judgment will be delivered in a transformed political landscape. The electoral outcome the SIR was alleged to influence has been recorded, with West Bengal returning 207 of 294 seats in favour of the BJP on a record 92.47 per cent turnout. That fact does not extinguish the constitutional question; it sharpens it, because the relationship between the magnitude of deletion and the margin of victory, flagged by Bagchi J, in open court, will now be examinable in concrete numerical terms. What is at stake is whether India’s voter-roll architecture rests on a constitutional command the executive must honour, or on a statutory entitlement it may reconfigure at intervals of its choosing.
Vedant Chaudhary and Hardik Malik are Assistant Professors of Law at IILM University, Greater Noida.
Views expressed are personal.