Yes SIR, no voters

47 lakh voters were erased from Bihar’s electoral rolls between June and September 2025 reflecting the tensions inherent in electoral reforms measures. The Supreme Court, in its judgment dated May 27, 2026, upheld this rationale as a necessary cost of ensuring a “clean democracy”. But democracy cannot be cleansed by erasing citizens from participation.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was introduced by the Election Commission of India (ECI) as an administrative mechanism to rectify the inaccuracies accumulated over two decades within Bihar’s electoral rolls. Given patterns of migration, mortality and demographic transition, periodic updating was arguably necessary. No dispute there. But the troubling question lies in how that cleanup was carried out and why the Court appeared so willing to accept it with minimal scrutiny.

The Court interpreted the phrase “any constituency” under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RP Act,1950), which states,

"Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-section (2), the Election Commission may at any time, for reasons to be recorded, direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency in such manner as it may think fit:

Provided that subject to the other provisions of this Act, the electoral roll for the constituency, as in force at the time of the issue of any such direction, shall continue to be in force until the completion of the special revision so directed."

It constitutes a significant point of doctrinal contention. By construing “any” to authorise simultaneous revision across all the 243 constituencies, the judgment arguably expands the statutory text beyond its ordinary semantic limits. Jurisprudential principles of statutory interpretation have consistently distinguished “any” from “all” where legislative intent so requires. Accordingly, the Court leaned on the General Clauses Act and precedent on election symbol jurisprudence as justificatory tools warrants closer analytical scrutiny.

The Court’s application of the proportionality doctrine presents a further point of concern. Relying upon the Demonetisation judgment, it held that judicial bodies ought not interfere with the policy choices of the Election Commission. This analogy, however, is analytically problematic. Demonetisation was a matter of economic governance whereas voter roll deletion concerns access to democratic participation itself. Applying the same standard to both minimises the gravity of disenfranchisement.

Analysis of the Election Commission's constituency-wise data from the SIR exercise in Bihar shows a systemic disparity in the final deletion of voters. While Muslims constituted 24.7% of the 65.75 lakh voters initially flagged for scrutiny, they accounted for 32% of the 3.23 lakh voters permanently deleted after ground-level verification – a rate disproportionate to their share of the flagged pool. The disparity was not uniform but acutely concentrated in the Seemanchal region – comprising Kishanganj, Purnea, Katihar and Araria – which recorded the highest deletion rate in the state at 7.7%, nearly double the state average. In Kishanganj alone, the deletion rate for a flagged Muslim voter was 3.7%, against 1.9% for a flagged non-Muslim. Despite the constitutional and representational significance of this pattern, the judgment did not interrogate these disparities and the Election Commission was not required to justify them.

The Bihar rationale becomes harder to defend when placed beside West Bengal. A second wave of SIR conducted between December 2025 and February 2026 – following directly from the Bihar template – removed 91 lakh voters ahead of the 2026 Assembly elections. In Murshidabad, where Muslims constitute 66% of the population, 4.55 lakh voters were deleted. In Malda, 52% Muslim, a further 2.4 lakh were removed. In Jangipur constituency alone, the Hindu-Muslim ratio in the voter list inverted overnight – from 46:54 to 52:48 – after 32,500 of 36,581 deleted voters turned out to hold Muslim names. In Nandigram, while Muslims make up 25% of the population, over 95% of the names deleted were Muslim. The pattern, once, is a coincidence. Twice is a policy. Yet, the Election Commission has not been called upon to account for it.

The judgment introduced an institutional safeguard requiring the Election Commission to refer disputed questions of citizenship to the Ministry of Home Affairs before effecting final deletion from electoral rolls. In theory, this keeps the ECI from acting as a citizenship tribunal. In practice, however, the safeguard looks fragile. The Ministry faces no deadline, no penalty for delay and no requirement to finish its inquiry before voters return to the polls.

The Bihar SIR judgment sets a troubling precedent. It signals that a constitutional authority, acting with recorded reasons and supported by a non-obstante clause, may undertake a state-wide restructuring of the electorate within a compressed timeframe. The Court’s articulation of “manifest arbitrariness” as the operative standard of review significantly narrows the scope of judicial intervention. This approach raises governance concerns given the dual role of the ECI as both regulator and the administrator of the electoral processes.

Democracies are judged not only by who wins the elections, but by how the electorate itself is constituted. When processes governing voter eligibility are marked by opacity, procedural compression and constrained avenues of review, the legitimacy of electoral outcomes may be normatively contested notwithstanding judicial validation.

The Court judgment addressed the question of the SIR’s legality but did not substantially engage with its democratic implications. But constitutional democracy asks more of institutions than simple legal compliance. In the case about the composition of the electorate itself, legality and democracy should not have travelled on separate tracks.

Adarsh Anand is a law student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.