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Legitimising Mass Disenfranchisement: PUCL Condemns the Supreme Court’s SIR Verdict
People’s Union For Civil Liberties
The People’s Union For Civil Liberties (PUCL) condemns the 27th May, 2026 decision of the Supreme Court in ‘Association of Democratic Rights v. Election Commission of India’ as a singular blow to the principle of political equality in India. In one of its most consequential decisions, the Court legitimized the mass disenfranchisement exercise conducted by the Election Commission of India which disproportionately affected minorities, migrants, the poor and women and was contrary to existing law and procedure. This mass disenfranchisement exercise went under the nomenclature of ‘Special Intensive Review’ (SIR).
While the Court goes through legal pyrotechnics to uphold the SIR, none of its legal justifications can hide the fact that at the end of the SIR exercise, the electorate of Bihar has effectively shrunk by more than 68 lakh voters. 65 lakh voters were deleted when the draft rolls were published. When the final rolls were published, another 3.66 lakh voters were deleted and 21.53 lakh voters were added. However, due to lack of transparency in the data published by ECI, it is impossible to know if the 21.53 lakh additions were of the same voters whose names were deleted. It has been widely reported that most of the deletions that took place were of voters from low-income, migrant working population as well as women.
The analysis placed by eminent social scientist Yogendra Yadav before the Court notes that ‘there are three criteria for assessing the quality of electoral rolls: completeness, accuracy and equity.’ For completeness, ‘the globally accepted measure is the Electoral to Adult Population ratio or the EP ratio, which is best measured by comparing the number of electors with the number of persons in the voting age population.’ Yadav demonstrated that ‘before the impugned SIR exercise, Bihar’s EP Ratio was at 97%, which is slightly below the national average.’ After the SIR exercise, ‘the ratio has been brought down to 88%, which is a sharp fall of nine percentage points.’
Yogendra Yadav further buttresses this argument by reference to the census data. As per the census data, 8.18 crore adults are presumptively eligible to vote. Before the SIR, the number of voters was 7.89 crore voters. The aim of the SIR should have been to ensure that all those eligible to vote are included in the rolls which means that the effort should have been to increase the number of voters to include as many of the 8.18 crore eligible voters as possible. However, instead of inclusion of eligible voters, what resulted through the SIR is the exclusion of eligible voters. As Yadav submitted before the Court, ‘Such a scale of exclusion is unprecedented in the history of any electoral roll revision in India and directly violates the SIR’s own mandate, which is constitutionally supposed to be an inclusive process.’
The Court failed to recognise that the SIR, by design, excludes the working poor, women and other marginalised communities. This is because the proof of eligibility in the SIR was restricted to a set of 11 documents, most of which are less likely to be found in the homes of marginalised communities. As the submissions before the Court indicated, the poorest people are often the ones with the least documents. The fact that the Court gave the green signal to the ECI’s exclusion of documents to access the ability to vote such as ration card and EPIC (which was previously accepted by the ECI) indicts the Court’s failure to call out the class bias of the ECI’s decision on the question of what are the valid documents that presumptive voters can submit. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that those born after 2003, were asked to produce identity documents of both their parents. The Court ignored the sociological reality that India is a document poor society and came to the wrong conclusion that these documents are “ordinarily available to electors”.
Effect of the SC ruling: Approval for mass disenfranchisement
What the Supreme Court judgment does is to give the seal of legal approval to mass disenfranchisement. The SIR lays waste to the work of the Election Commission ever since independence when the ECI sought to include more and more electors. This constitutional imperative to include, the SIR ignores, in its haste to remove voters. The Court turns a blind eye to the disproportionate removal of voters who are women and minorities from the rolls without any fair opportunity to contest the removal.
The ECI’s work over the decades has been geared towards facilitating the inclusion of as many voters as possible in a society in which the literacy levels were historically low. In this context, the structural orientation of the ECI towards inclusion of as many voters as possible was manifested in the Representation of the People Act, 1951, the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 as well as the manuals of the ECI as well as judgments of the Supreme Court. It is this entire body of law meant to ensure that electoral rolls are premised on inclusion, developed over decades, which the ECI ignored. The illegalities were encoded in the decision to do the SIR as well as the timing of the SIR. Illegality was also structurally inbuilt into the short time period in which it was conducted. Illegality pervaded the lack of procedural safeguards which were meant to ensure that no voter who was on the rolls was unfairly deleted from the rolls. It is unfortunate that the Supreme Court failed to evaluate the illegal conduct of the ECI against the parameter of inclusion which the Constitution mandated in its founding promise of ‘We the people’.
Why the SIR now: Key question ignored
The most basic question as to why the SIR was deemed necessary today, was not answered with any satisfaction by the ECI. The Court accepted without any evidence or data, the ECI’s bald and bare assertion that the SIR was required because, ‘a demographic change due to rapid urbanisation and migration in the last 20 years since the intensive revision in 2003 which has led to repeated, multiple and defective entries on the electoral roll. Second, the mandate of the Commission under Article 326 to ensure that only Indian citizens are on the electoral roll.’
Surely, it is the responsibility of the Court to probe the assertions a bit further? What is the data which indicates the scale of multiple and defective entries on the electoral rolls? How many non-Indian citizens are on the electoral rolls? These questions ought to have been asked by the Court as the ECI in effect delegitimized all its previous work by starting the process of enrolment of voters anew. Was the problem serious enough to create a new electoral roll, ignoring the legal framework on elections developed by the ECI as well as the interpretations of the Supreme Court?
The ECI found its scrap of legality for doing the SIR in Section 21 (3) of the Representation of People Act, 1950 which states that, ‘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.’ The strained interpretation arrived at is to argue that SIR is justified under this provision as the word used is ‘any constituency’, which can be taken to mean ‘every’ constituency.
So, in effect, what is actually a limited power given to the ECI is interpreted by the apex Court as an unlimited power to do SIR throughout the country.
This technique of statutory interpretation by the Supreme Court is devoid of a constitutional ethos. One would expect the highest constitutional court of the largest democracy in the world, to interpret a statute of such far reaching effects such as the Representation of the People Act, not merely in terms of its wording, but rather interpret the wording animated with the spirit of the Constitution.
Upturning the constitutional ethos
The ethos of the Constitution is manifested in the Supreme Court decision in ‘Lal Babu Hussain v. Electoral Officer’ (1995) which had held that the inclusion of a person’s name in the electoral roll carries with it a presumption of eligibility to vote and presumption of citizenship. In this case the court had directed that where the citizenship of a person is suspected, a fresh notice had to be issued “disclosing the material on the basis whereof he has reason to suspect that the person concerned is not a citizen of India.” In ADR v. ECI (2026), the Court ignored this crucial protection given to people already enrolled in voter rolls, on the flimsy basis that Lal Babu Hussain was not delivered in the context of a systemic or intensive verification exercise by the ECI. The Court failed to acknowledge that SIR completely reverses the presumption that a person on the voter roll, and who has voted in previous elections, is a citizen.
The diabolical response: Backdoor entry of NRC and depriving welfare schemes
The troubling nature of this judgment lies in the fact that it opens the door for the NRC. The Court holds that where the Commission “is not satisfied that a person meets the statutory conditions for inclusion in the electoral roll,” it “would be incumbent upon it to refer such an individual to the competent authority within the Central Government for adjudication” of citizenship under the Citizenship Act, 1955. The Court mandates the setting up of an institutional infrastructure within four weeks without mandating any constitutional safeguards. The similarities to the NRC process, with all its documented catastrophes, are too stark to ignore. The Court has created the architecture of an NRC by judicial fiat, through the backdoor of an electoral revision exercise.
The implications of this judgment are far reaching and go beyond the right to vote. Even before the Court delivered this judgement, the Bihar Chief Minister had already announced that people deleted in the SIR “will not be entitled to any government benefits, including ration and other welfare schemes” and that their bank passbooks will be cancelled. Similar announcements have also been made by West Bengal Ministers. By upholding the constitutionality of the SIR, the Court has legitimised not only disenfranchisement but the stripping away of other socio-economic rights from those who are deleted from the voter rolls. It is not just the right to vote that the SIR threatens to snatch away – it is all other rights guaranteed to us as citizens. This judgment lays the basis for the ECI to go ahead with this exercise of mass disenfranchisement nationwide and a stripping of socio-economic rights from all those whose names are deleted from the rolls.
One had hoped that the Court’s institutional memory would have kicked in and the Court would have recalled how its judgment in ‘Anoop Baranwal v Union of India’ (2023) which had laid down an important safeguard to preserve the independence of the ECI was casually overturned by the Modi government. In Anoop Baranwal the Court had laid down that the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner and the Election Commissioners, shall be on the advice of a Committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition of the Lok Sabha and the Chief Justice of India. Just before the parliamentary elections of 2024, the Modi government passed a law nullifying the judgement of the Supreme Court and removing the Chief Justice from the Selection Committee and replacing him with a Union Cabinet Minister. The law now prescribes that the Selection Committee will consist of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister, and Leader of Opposition/leader of the largest opposition party in Lok Sabha.
The implications of the overturning of Anoop Baranwal has been far reaching. It is the ECI – which is controlled by the ruling party – which has initiated the SIR, ignoring the legal and constitutional framework, essentially to serve the interests of the ruling party. The Supreme Court seems unable to take on board the fact that the SIR process is undertaken by an entity which is no longer independent, but rather by design, totally under the control of the government. If the Supreme Court had taken forward its institutional commitment to preserving the independence of the ECI, and hence the right to vote in India it would not have so blithely concluded that the SIR ‘exercise is firmly anchored in both constitutional principle and statutory design.’
In conclusion: Instead of the electorate choosing the government, the government is choosing the electorate!
The PUCL is of the opinion that the judgement in ADR v ECI is devoid of a constitutional imagination, lacks fidelity to the existing law on elections and empowers the ECI to lay waste to the principle of political equality.
Just as the Supreme Court betrayed the promise of the Constitution in ADM Jabalpur (1976) by stripping individuals of judicial recourse when detained during the emergency, the Supreme Court in ADR v ECI (2026) lays waste to one of the key goals of the Constitution so eloquently described by Babasaheb Ambedkar, ‘In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote and one vote, one value.’
While ADM Jabalpur was limited to the context of the emergency, the decision in ADR v ECI sets the seal of the Supreme Court on the betrayal of the promise of political equality, for all time.
This complete betrayal of the promise of political equality in effect sets in place the template for a new India – an India in which the Union government acting through the ECI will select its own electorate. This presages nothing less than the death of democracy as we know it, in this country.
Kavita Srivastava, President; Dr. V. Suresh, General Secretary
People’s Union for Civil Liberties
[Statement courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based independent online journal founded in 2002, publishing articles on peace, democracy, social justice, ecology, secularism, and people’s movements. Edited by Binu Mathew, it is known for giving space to progressive, grassroots, and alternative voices often ignored by mainstream media.]
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The SIR, A Long Road to Exile?
Darshana Mitra
In December 2025, Aheda Khatun, a resident of Nagaon, Assam, was pushed into Bangladesh. She had been declared to be a foreigner by a Foreigners’ Tribunal in Nagaon in 2019, and her writ petition challenging this decision was dismissed in August 2025 by the Gauhati High Court.
Khatun was a D, or Doubtful, Voter—one of the many tens of thousands marked so during an intensive revision of electoral rolls in Assam in 1997. Her expulsion concluded a decades-long journey that began in circumstances similar to the intensive revision of electoral rolls being carried out across India today: the Special Intensive Revision.
Since 2025, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across twelve states has resulted in a tenth of their total electorate being deleted: a net 5.2 crore persons in all have been removed from the rolls.[1] To understand the scale, the first general elections in India were held with an electorate of 17.3 crore. At this rate, by the time the SIR is completed across all states and union territories, a population nearly equal to India’s entire electorate in 1951 may have been excluded. The process marks a remarkable shift in the Election Commission’s national mandate: from enabling the exercise of voting rights, to disabling it.
But more concerning is SIR’s afterlife. As demonstrated by the history of D-voters like Khatun, citizenship determination processes following electoral roll revisions have resulted in statelessness, detention, and eventual expulsion. The Assam revisions of 1997 resulted in 3 lakh persons in the state being marked as D-voters. To remove this tag and be eligible to vote again, D-voters had to prove their citizenship before Foreigners Tribunals in the state. That process continues to this date, three decades after the revision took place. To map this journey, it is essential to make sense of the ECI’s role in citizenship determination.
Citizenship Determination
By law, only citizens can vote, and the ECI is mandated to prepare and revise the electoral rolls. The ECI periodically updates the rolls to account for births, deaths, and electors moving residence. Unlike this summary revision of electoral rolls, an ‘intensive revision’ is done de novo: the primary data is collected afresh, and the older electoral roll is tossed out. A revision of electoral rolls necessarily includes deletions and inclusions, and in updating electoral rolls, the ECI may find that a person does not qualify for enrolment because of age, residence, or citizenship status.
The last such special intensive revision took place in 2003. What has significantly changed between the 2003 and 2026 revisions is the role of the enumerator in clarifying the elector’s citizenship.
The ECI’s instructions in 2003 made clear that such a determination was not the job of the enumerator. However, the 2026 instructions for the Bihar and West Bengal SIRs specifically state that in case a person is suspected to be a foreign national, their cases would be referred to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955.
Can the ECI determine citizenship? As admitted by the ECI itself in its affidavit before the Supreme Court, the Commission does not have the power to conclusively determine a person’s citizenship. Moreover, as has been observed by the Supreme Court, when an authority is called upon to decide, for the limited purpose of another law, whether a person is a citizen of India, it must do so in the context of constitutional provisions and the provisions of the Citizenship Act. The enquiry must be quasi-judicial in character and must ensure the right to a fair hearing, which includes the right to be informed of the grounds on which the person is suspected to be a foreigner.
The ECI occupies, therefore, a liminal yet pivotal space in citizenship determination. It lacks the power to conclusively determine (inclusion or exclusion from the electoral rolls by itself does not determine citizenship status). But in choosing to exclude, the ECI can flag an individual as a suspected foreigner. This can, in turn, trigger other processes that eventually may result in a conclusive determination that a person is a foreigner and an illegal migrant. All that the ECI can do is to cast doubt on an individual’s citizenship status. But once cast, this doubt can be painfully difficult to dispel, as we see in Aheda Khatun’s case.
Casting Doubt
In the 1997 intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state of Assam, an Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) would decide on inclusion or exclusion. Their decisions were based on reports from Local Verification Officers (LVO), who had conducted spot visits to determine whether a person was eligible to be included in the electoral list. If a person was suspected by the LVO to be a foreigner, the ERO would refer their case to the Superintendent of Border Police in that district, who in turn would refer the case to Foreigners Tribunals, or FTs. On receiving the reference, the FTs would issue notice to the suspected voter and hear their case.
The exercise left the ECI in a quandary. EROs doubted the citizenship of over 3 lakh persons, but the ECI could not delete names of persons on the grounds that they were foreigners without first going through the process of determining their citizenship, but it was impossible to conclusively determine the citizenship of 3 lakh persons in time for the General Elections of 1998.
This contrived crisis birthed the creation of the D-voter tag. A person whose citizenship was in doubt would remain on the electoral roll with a ‘D’ marked against their name, ineligible to vote till they were determined to be Indian citizens by the Foreigners Tribunals. The ECI’s instructions in this respect were upheld by the Gauhati High Court, which observed that the “peculiar situation relating to influx and presence of a large number of foreigners in Assam” justified this specific process of electoral roll revision.
Over three decades after the Assam SIR, in response to a question asked in Parliament by AIMIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi, the home ministry stated that as of October 2019, there were 113,738 D voters in Assam, of which 70,723 were women, like Aheda Khatun. This proportion mirrors the West Bengal SIR exclusion figures and indicates similar factors at play—young (often minor) married women, who had travelled to and settled in their marital homes in different districts, were caught in the crosshairs of the D voter exercise, because they were unable to produce the necessary documentation.
Suspicion, or doubt, once attached to your citizenship status, may take decades to shake off, as evidenced by the thousands of D voters still waiting for a notice from the Foreigners Tribunal in Assam. The wait to be heard by a Foreigner Tribunal is interminable and painful, so much so that D-voters frequently approach courts just so that they can receive a notice from the tribunals. Sona Khan, a D-voter, approached the Gauhati High Court thrice—twice to receive a notice, and once because, having received a notice, he found that even though the Superintendent of the Border Police had observed that there was no reason to believe that Khan was a foreigner, the Foreigners Tribunal had issued notice.
In August 2024, the Chief Minister of Assam stated in the Assam Assembly that there were 119570 D voters in Assam, of which 54,411 persons had been declared to be foreigners. In April 2025, the Chief Minister of Assam declared that only 25,000 D-voters remained in Assam—he attributed this sharp dip to the number of Bengali Hindu D-voters who the Foreigners Tribunals had found to be citizens. Therefore, once your name is removed from the electoral roll based on being suspected of being a foreign national, the ECI no longer bears any responsibility towards the consequences of such removal.
What are Foreigners Tribunals?
Once a D-voter’s case is referred to the Foreigners Tribunal, and the tribunal issues notice, the trial begins, sort of.
It is quite likely that a D-voter may never see the inside of a tribunal. Almost half of FT orders passed between 1985 and 2019 were ex parte, without the proceedee being heard or even present. Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946 (now Section 15 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025), placed the burden of proving citizenship on the D-voter, and Foreigners Tribunals would routinely declare persons to be foreigners in ex parte cases, on the grounds that the proceedee bore the burden, and by failing to appear, he failed to discharge the burden.
A 2025 report by researchers at Queen Mary University London and the National Law School of India University demonstrates how FTs lack judicial independence, are controlled primarily by the executive, and the qualifications to become an FT member have progressively weakened over time. In 1964, only retired judges could head FTs; now any lawyer with seven years of experience can. FT members are not trained in any rigorous manner.
Most importantly, however, FT procedure casts the entire burden of proving one’s citizenship on the proceedee, to the extent that FTs frequently refuse to even issue summons to witnesses, and inquiry officers and LVOs are rarely examined. Till 2013, there was no consistent process followed for serving notice on the proceedee. They continue to follow highly inconsistent approaches to appreciating evidence. Therefore, once the ECI declares a person to be a suspected foreign national, they are at the mercy of a highly arbitrary tribunal that lacks any procedural safeguards.
From the Exception to the Norm
In West Bengal, following the SIR, the Supreme Court directed the establishment of Appellate Tribunals, headed by retired high court judges, to hear appeals by 27 lakh persons who have been excluded from the final SIR list. These are not the same as Foreigners Tribunals (even though there is no legislative bar to establish FTs in any state). The mandate and operating procedure of these tribunals have not been made public yet. It is therefore unclear whether, on deciding whether a person should have been excluded from the electoral rolls, the tribunal will enter into questions of citizenship determination.
Appellate Tribunals have not been set up in any other state, and persons excluded from the electoral rolls in the 11 other states will have to apply to be included afresh. The legal lacunae only mean that if the ERO suspects them of being illegal migrants, it would be the beginning of a long journey to exile.
What happens after an excluded person is found to not be an Indian citizen? Unless they are found to have valid travel documents like a passport and a visa or if they are exempted under any specific order (for example, if they are Hindus from Bangladesh who entered India before 31 December 2024), they are vulnerable to coercive measures of removal, detention and deportation.
While the central government has the power to direct the removal of foreigners, deportation requires another country to take in the deportee. Unless a country is throwing persons into international waters, deportation always involves removal to some other country. Unless India’s processes of nationality verification determine whether the person being expelled is actually a citizen of the country they are being removed to, deportation becomes expulsion: an act of unilateral violence, pushing a person into a country that does not recognise them as their national.
India has, in fact, repeatedly acknowledged nationality verification to be necessary for deportation. In a response to a parliamentary question on deportations of Indian nationals from the United States, Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar described how an “unambiguous verification” of nationality is essential to deportation, and a “generally accepted principle in international relations”. A generally accepted principle that India is proudly flouting.
Assam has pushed 330 persons since last year, relying on a 1950 legislation, the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act (IEAA), enabling expulsion of persons identified as “undesirable migrants”- Aheda Khatun was one of them. The IEAA does not require any judicial determination of citizenship or nationality verification—in a way, it is worse than the Foreigners Tribunal Regime.
Unrelated to the SIR, last April, around 1,024 people suspected to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh were detained in Ahmedabad and Surat. In Ahmedabad, 890 people were detained, paraded through the streets by the police, and subsequently detained again, including in an open ground in a sports stadium. Only 143 of the detainees from Ahmedabad had been identified as Bangladeshi nationals by Indian authorities. Of the 6,500 detained from Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara, Vapi, and Kutch, only 450 have been identified as Bangladeshi nationals. There is no suggestion in the reports that any effort has been made to contact Bangladeshi authorities for nationality verification.
The alleged pushback into Bangladesh happened after the central government told the Supreme Court that deportation would happen in accordance with Indian laws. As described in a January 2025 order in Maja Daruwala v Union of India, and as admitted by the central government before the Supreme Court recently, deportation cannot take place without nationality verification. If an apprehended individual claims Indian citizenship, verification of their citizenship would take place in the state or union territory that the individual claims to be from. None of these processes seems to have taken place.
However, these guidelines have been superseded by a May 2025 notification that does away with the requirement of nationality verification entirely. Of 78 persons pushed into Bangladesh in 2025, three were identified by Bangladeshi authorities as Indian citizens and are being prosecuted as illegal migrants. These 78 individuals, reportedly brought from Gujarat, were blindfolded and left in the wilds of the Sunderbans. How these three Indian citizens will find their way back is anyone’s guess. In one admitted instance of such a mistaken push, Sunali Khatun, a pregnant woman from West Bengal who was pushed into Bangladesh, could return to India only five months later in December 2025, after her case was widely reported and taken up by the state government.
Is this the fate of millions, to be caught in a loop between a nation that does not want them and another to which they don’t belong?
There, and Back Again
Unlike in Assam, no one excluded from the SIR has had to attend proceedings to prove their citizenship, and no one certainly has been deported yet. Foreigners Tribunals do not yet exist in other states. But as we have seen in Assam, exclusion from the SIR is the beginning of a decades-long journey towards statelessness and expulsion, enabled by India’s immigration laws. The ECI’s revision of electoral rolls does not conclusively determine —it only casts doubt, and then leaves the rest to India’s immigration laws.
The ECI has repeatedly used the language of purification to describe the SIR. The excision of 5.2 crore names from the electoral roll, no doubt, is an exercise in cleansing the body politic of the nation. But the excision of people like Aheda Khatun from the electoral roll is merely an initial step in the path to purification—what begins as a removal from the political community of voters ends for many in their physical expulsion from the territory. As Khatun struggles to get back to India, this nightmarish journey may only be beginning for millions of others.
Note
1. The deletions numbered 7.2 crores, and 2 crore voters were added, leading to a net reduction of 5.2 crore individuals from the electoral rolls.
[Darshana Mitra is an assistant professor at the National Law School of India University and the co-director of the Citizenship and Immigration Law Clinic. Courtesy: The India Forum, an independent online journal-magazine that seeks to widen and deepen our conversations on the issues that concern people.]
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Why the SIR Is Narendra Modi’s Chosen Weapon to Crush Democracy
Prem Shankar Jha
At a press conference she held at her Kalighat residence immediately after the West Bengal assembly election results were announced on May 4, former West Bengal chief minister, Mamta Bannerjee, whose Trinamool Congress had suffered its first defeat in 15 years, had adamantly declared, “There is no question of me resigning; we were defeated not by public mandate but by conspiracy.” She accused the Election Commission and the central security forces of colluding with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to “loot” the election. “I have not lost, so I will not go to Raj Bhavan. I will not tender my resignation,” she said.
In closed-door meetings she held later with her newly elected MLAs, she reportedly added, “Let them impose President’s Rule if they want. Let them dismiss me if they want. Let this day go down on the record as a black day for democracy.”
Her reason for taking that step was perhaps her realisation that she and her political party, the Trinamool Congress, were not going to be the only, but the first, victims of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s determination to crush the last remnant of India’s democracy – its so far irreproachable election system – and turn India into a fascist ‘Hindu state’.
The weapon Modi has chosen is a Special Intensive Review of the electoral rolls. The word ‘special’ suggests that the normal annual updating of electoral rolls has been a lackadaisical affair, and needs backstopping every few years with an intensive review of the voters’ lists. Two of these were held in Bihar and West Bengal last year, because of the imminence of the state assembly elections, and were followed by decisive victories of the BJP in West Bengal and the BJP and allied political parties in Bihar. The SIRs have now been completed in the 11 most populous of India’s 28 states, that account for two-thirds of its population and three of its eight Union territories that are ruled directly by the Union government. A pattern is emerging that fully vindicates the Bengal former chief minister’s warning that these so-called SIRs are designed only to allow the Modi government to steal election after election until its grip on the country is complete.
Why is Modi doing this only now, when he has already been the prime minister of India for the past 11 years? The answer is that he needs to – after the jolt he got from the 2024 Lok Sabha election results – because he knows he can get away with it thanks to the Election Commission whose pliant nature he has reinforced.
An attempt was made by transparency activists to ensure the government did not fully control the selection of election commissioners and a five-judge bench of the court ruled in March 2023 that the Modi government needed to enact a law that would create a proper, independent, and transparent process for the appointment of the chief election commissioner and other election commissioners. But it held that until that law was passed it should appoint the commissioners through a committee consisting of the prime minister, the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Chief Justice of India.
This was the loophole that Modi was looking for. So he lost no time in passing that law, but with a single change that reversed its entire intent: This was to replace ‘the Chief Justice of India’ in the election committee with ‘a Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister’. Since the BJP and its allies were in power, and none of the latter saw the trap he was dragging them into, they gave their assent. That law has given the ruling party a permanent majority in the choice of election commissioners and the BJP has sought to use this ‘court-approved’ power to steal the vote election after election in order to stay in power for the foreseeable future.
Modi began to use his complete control over the ECI within months to the enactment. The law he passed in response to the Supreme Court’s directive shows such utter contempt that it has been challenged by many civil rights organisations in the country and numerous individuals ranging from members of former and current members of Parliament to eminent citizens who fear that India’s democracy is at its last gasp. Chief among the appellants are the four most respected civil rights organisations in the country, The Association for Democratic Rights, the Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties, Common Cause and the Centre for Public Interest Litigation.
The Supreme Court has bunched all of these petitions together and, as is its wont, took its time in getting to hear them. The matter is being considered only now – three years after it should have been. Admittedly, justice hastened can lead to justice denied, but on this issue, justice delayed is giving the Modi government all the time it needs to complete the dismantling of India’s democracy and its conversion into a one-party quasi-fascist state.
Modi unveiled the principal weapon that he wished to deploy to achieve his goal on June 24 , 2025. This was to hold an SIR of the electoral rolls. In its various submissions and FAQs, the Election Commission explained the need for the SIR by saying that as follows the last full Special Intensive Revision was conducted in 2002–2004 and that there had been a massive demographic change in the country since then, and that it was likely that a large number of deceased persons, permanently shifted voters, and duplicate entries remain on the rolls. And that since only summary revisions (i.e. annual routine updates) had been carried out over the past two decades, these were not sufficient to remove accumulated errors.
The ECI’s explanations were intended to fool a gullible electorate into believing that the Modi government is belatedly making up for the laxity and irresponsibility of the work by earlier commissioners appointed by its predecessors. But even a superficial examination of the changes in the lists of registered voters over the past 70 years shows that this is nothing more than a pretext for tearing up the present voters’ lists and creating new ones that will increase its chance of staying in power for the foreseeable future. For there have been 18 elections to the Lok Sabha and 345 elections to state assemblies in the past 75 years, and in not one has the performance and independence of the Election Commission even been questioned, let alone impugned.
After Independence, the ECI engaged in the ground-breaking task from 1948 till 1952 of generating an electoral roll that could give effect to the principle of universal adult franchise. The task took four years because there was no way then for identifying and enumerating the largest electorate in the world, other than through a house-to-house, hut-to-hut count of every living soul in India’s half a million cities, towns and villages.
This basic survey was updated, once every five years till 1967, and then twice every five years from 1971 onwards, after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi separated the Central from state assembly elections. This doubled the ECI’s workload, but made it even more necessary for it to maintain accurate data on the electorate. It was only able to cope with this doubling of its workload because of India’s decennial censuses. The introduction of digital data storage progressively eased its workload as well.
Twenty years later its task became even easier when Electronic Voting Machines and record keeping were introduced, first in selected states in 1998, and then nationwide in 2004. That finalisation of the switch to electronic voting and record-keeping enabled the ECI to conduct its first Special Intensive Review from 2002-2004, generating a basic electoral roll which has become the reference point for all elections held in the country since then, including the one launched by the Modi government in 2025.
The table below gives the results of that SIR.
| State / UT | Electorate (pre-SIR) | Electorate (post-SIR) | Increase (approx.) |
| Uttar Pradesh | 8.90 crore | 11.06 crore | +2.16 crore |
| West Bengal | 4.20 crore | 4.74 crore | +0.54 crore |
| Bihar | 3.85 crore | 4.50 crore | +0.65 crore |
| Maharashtra | 4.80 crore | 5.40 crore | +0.60 crore |
| Rajasthan | 3.10 crore | 3.47 crore | +0.37 crore |
| Madhya Pradesh | 3.00 crore | 3.47 crore | +0.47 crore |
| Gujarat | 2.90 crore | 3.37 crore | +0.47 crore |
| Andhra Pradesh | 4.50 crore | 5.11 crore | +0.61 crore |
| Tamil Nadu | 3.80 crore | 4.16 crore | +0.36 crore |
| Kerala | 1.95 crore | 2.13 crore | +0.18 crore |
| Karnataka | 3.20 crore | 3.70 crore | +0.50 crore |
| All India | 61.0 crore | 67.1 crore | +6.1 crore |
Sources: The state-wise electorate figures for 1999 and 2004 are taken from the official statistical reports published by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
- For 1999 (13th Lok Sabha Elections), see Statistical Report on General Elections, 1999, published by the Election Commission.
- For 2004 (14th Lok Sabha Elections), see Statistical Report on General Elections, 2004, published by the Election Commission.
Specific Tables Used:
- In both reports, Table No. 1 (or Section on “Electoral Data”) gives the state-wise number of registered voters.
- The 2002–2004 SIR was conducted between the 1999 and 2004 elections, and its impact is clearly visible in the jump in numbers between these two reports.
In sum, between 1951 and 2004 the Election Commission’s growing experience, and progressively better methods of registration and record- keeping, increased the size of the electorate. But, in the sharpest possible contrast, as the table issued by the Election Commission itself, which is reproduced below, shows, the 2025-26 SIR has done the exact opposite, and reduced the size of the electorate by almost the same proportion.
| State/UT | Total Voters (before draft list) | Revised Voters (final roll) | Voters deleted (absolute\net) | Change(%) |
| Andaman and Nicobar Islands | 3.10 lakh | 2.58 lakh | -0.52 lakh | -16.6% |
| Chhattisgarh | 2.12 crore | 1.87 crore | -25 lakh | -11.8% |
| Goa | 11.85 lakh | 10.57 lakh | -1.28 lakh | -10.8% |
| Gujarat | 5.08 crore | 4.40crore | -68 Lakh | -14.5% |
| Kerala | 2.78 crore | 2.69 crore | -9 lakh | -3.24% |
| Lakshadweep | 0.57 lakh | 0.57 lakh | -206 | -0.35% |
| Madhya Pradesh | 5.74 crore | 5.39 crore | -34.25 lakh | -5.96% |
| Puducherry | 10.21 lakh | 9.44 lakh | -0.77 lakh | -7.54% |
| Rajasthan | 5.46 crore | 5.15 crore | -31 lakh | -5.7% |
| Tamil Nadu | 6.41 crore | 5.67 crore | -74 lakh | -11.5% |
| Uttar Pradesh | 15.44 crore | 13.39 crore | ~2.05 crore | -13.21% |
| West Bengal | 7.69 crore | 6.86 crore | -8.386 crores | -10.9% |
| Chhattisgarh | 2.12 crore | 1.87 crores | -0.35 cr. | -11.8% |
| Total (Phase II) | 50.99 crore | 45.81 crore | -5.18 crore | -10.2% |
Which of these two diametrically opposite trends – where the 2002-2004 SIR led to an increase in the size of the electorate while the 2025 one led to a sharp decrease – should the Indian public trust? The answer can be found by comparing both sets of data with a third: That is the change in the size of the population of India between 2004 and 2024. This grew from 113.6 crores in 2004, to 144.2 crores in 2024.
Moreover, as the table below shows, this increase was fully reflected in the increase in the number of registered voters in the Lok Sabha elections of this period:
| Year | Lok Sabha | Registered Voters |
| 2004 | 14th | 67.15 crore |
| 2009 | 15th | 71.67 crore |
| 2014 | 16th | 83.41 crore |
| 2019 | 17th | 91.20 crore |
| 2024 | 18th | 97.79 crore |
This is an increase of 30.64 crores in 20 years, an annual increase of almost 1.5 crores a year. These voters’ rolls were prepared during the tenure of Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi both. All of this data, compiled by AI from EC reports, reflect the same rate of growth of the electorate, of about 1.56% a year, which is identical to the growth of the +18 population of the country during this period. So the possibility of double-counting of voters because of mass migration, non-registration of change of residence, or death – all the plausible reasons that CEC Gyanesh Kumar has given – at the scale suggested seems improbable.
So how does one explain the drop in the size of the electorate, and that too by more than a tenth of the previously registered voters in, say, a state like West Bengal?
There are only two possible answers: the first is that the Election Commission has deliberately made it so difficult, and so expensive, for those who are not on the so-called “legacy electoral rolls” of 2004, created a full 20 years ago, to return to their original homes now to collect, or get re-issued, the documents of domicile that will enable them to qualify as voters, that huge numbers have simply given up trying. The second, which is Modi’s favourite, is the need to prove that they are truly Indian citizens and not illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, Myanmar, or any other place. Although the Supreme Court has asked the Election Commission to consider the Aadhaar card, every other proof of identity that a migrant worker needs has to be obtained from home.
The 10% drop in the electorate shows how vast is the number that have given up even trying to vote. That, of course is what Modi and the BJP want, for these are the poorest people in the country who are most prone to voting as a bloc, and have tended to vote, as the Aam Aadmi Party’s repeated victories in Delhi and more recently in Punjab show, for those who can give them a smidgen of hope for the future.
As many surveys have shown, a disproportionate proportion of the poorest in the country are also Muslims. So, Modi has all but succeeded in ensuring that only the relatively privileged will find it easy to cast their votes.
Mamata Banerjee is therefore right. The election in Bengal was, in all probability, ‘stolen’ through a conjunction of these factors. But what happened in Bengal will now happen in the rest of India.
[Prem Shankar Jha is an economist, author and Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He was formerly editor of Hindustan Times and The Financial Express and Information Adviser to Prime Minister V.P. Singh. His books include Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West?, and The Dismantling of India’s Democracy 1947 to 2025. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]
