NAPM Rejects Attempt to End Universal Franchise Through Ill-Conceived ‘Special Intensive Revision’ in Bihar

New Delhi- We are less than 100 days away from the end of the term of the elected government in Bihar. In a democracy, however limited, this is supposed to be the time when people’s felt needs take centre stage in public discourse. However, Bihar in 2025 is different. The Election Commission of India (ECI), formally an autonomous constitutional authority, has decided to undertake a ‘Special Intensive Revision’ (SIR) of the electoral roll in Bihar from the 25^th of June, putting a question mark over the voting rights of millions of Biharis, mere months before the assembly elections.

National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) calls upon the ECI to immediately stop the ill-conceived, undemocratic and unconstitutional process of SIR, and instead undertake a transparent and inclusive voter registration exercise, facilitating the right to vote for all Indians, in keeping with its constitutional mandate.  We also urge the Supreme Court to take a timely, fair and holistic view on the constitutionality of this entire exercise and direct ECI to not do anything that erodes the right to vote of lakhs of citizens.

In what is conceivably a malicious attempt to infringe upon the right to vote, the Election Commission of India conducted a hurried Special Intensive Revision of the Electoral Roll in Bihar, deleting 65 lakh voters from it just before elections are due in the state. In a show of arrogance, the Commission refused to publish names of those deleted and reasons for deletion.

Notably, the Supreme Court of India has directed the Commission to publish the list of deletions, along with reasons for the same and to publicise said list through all means available to it. The Court has also directed the Commission to accept Aadhaar and Voter IDs as part of people’s (forthcoming) appeals against deletion of their names. This is a welcome directive and is in line with the Court’s stated approach on this matter, i.e., that it will: 1) step in if there are mass exclusions in the SIR, and 2) that the principle guiding the special revision must be inclusion, not exclusion. NAPM welcomes the interim order passed by the bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymala Bagchi.

Upon court orders, the Election Commission was compelled to make the deletions list public. Ground reports have indicated gross inaccuracies in a hastily conducted exercise. The Commission for its part has announced that it has received documents for 98% of electors on the list. Meanwhile, journalists investigating the matter have shown gross irregularities in the SIR draft. Now election officials will be verifying the documents received to finish the exercise by 25^th of September.

In a press conference held after the Court ordered the Commission to make the deletions list public, rather than provide clear answers the Chief Election Commissioner arguably behaved like a ruling party representative attacking the opposition. This unprecedented display has clearly tarnished the reputation of the Commission, a constitutional authority.

Exclusion by Design: SIR and the politicization of citizenship in India:

As of 1^st August 2025, 65 lakh people have been struck off the earlier electoral roll of 7.9 crore electors. In an act of utter disregard for transparency and basic human decency, the ECI has refused to publish the names of those it struck off. This is the first electoral roll revision in the history of India where no additions have been made. This leaves one to wonder how thousands of electoral officers, who claim to have visited each household in the state, could not find a single new voter!

As per the Government of India’s own estimates, the adult population in Bihar is 8.18 crore. This figure accounts for factors such as migration etc. It follows that the final tally of electors on the ECI’s roll should approximate this figure. However, with only 7.24 crore electors on the draft SIR roll, we are looking at the potential exclusion of 94 lakh people!

This is also the first such revision in independent India’s history where the ECI has asked people to submit forms and documents to ‘prove their eligibility’ as electors. In the second phase of the SIR, election officers will decide on their eligibility. This is where the black-box category of “not recommended by BLO” will come into play. The ECI has not revealed the numbers recorded in this discretionary category during the SIR. This means we will have further deletions over the coming weeks.

With limited information, lack of means to file and pursue appeals, and the very short period of time before the electoral rolls are frozen (end of September), this exercise will, in all likelihood, result in taking away the right to vote from millions of people, especially those marginalized on grounds of caste, religion and gender.

Till the 24^th of June 2025, the ECI was responsible for registering voters. From the following day, this responsibility was shifted to the voters themselves. Moreover, the ECI has deployed criteria for enumeration that effectively turn voter registration into a citizenship test. It has decreed that those who did not feature on the electoral roll of 2003 (22 years ago) must re-register as voters, specifically those between 18–40 years of age. The purported reasoning behind the 2003 cutoff is that a Special Intensive Revision was conducted in that year whereby those on the rolls were verified to be Indian citizens.

Yet, when accountability activists used the RTI to ask the Commission for a copy of the 2003 order, they were simply given the June 24 order. Former Election Commission officials involved in the 2003 exercise have informed the media that in 2003 door to door verification of voters was conducted, but “electors were not asked to provide proof of citizenship.” Enumerators were not asked to determine citizenship. The Supreme Court has asked the Commission to provide details of documents considered in the 2003 revision. Furthermore, even though the Commission claimed in court that the SIR was based on an independent appraisal, it didn’t provide copies of any such appraisal or study when asked for the same through RTI requests. This seriously dents the credibility of the Election Commission. Such evasive responses to RTI requests and acting without prior consultations or studies shows the Commission to be working in an arbitrary and opaque manner.

To prove their citizenship, the ECI requires those not on the 2003 roll to submit one of eleven prescribed documents along with a new Declaration Form. Analysis of publicly available data shows that only 50% of the concerned population group in Bihar possesses one of the eleven documents required for the ECI’s eligibility test. Thus, by design, the process has the potential to — and in all likelihood will — unfairly exclude an inordinate number of people. In doing so, the ECI has crossed its remit as a facilitator of free, fair, and inclusive elections, and has instead attempted to become an arbiter of citizenship.

Bihar has nearly 8 crore electors. A sensitive exercise like the SIR was conducted in just 30 days. Much has been reported, even in the mainstream media, about the practical difficulties and errors in conducting an exercise of such magnitude in such a short period of time. The bureaucratic exercise, which saw the ECI claim that it trained 80,000 BLOs in just 72 hours, was botched from the start. Field based independent reports have shown exactly what anyone with a handle over reality could imagine: chronic lack of information, forms being uploaded enmasse without consent of voters by election officials in order to meet targets, the poorest spending their meagre savings to secure prescribed documents and fill forms, and utter confusion and worry about their voting rights being snatched. Despite the lack of transparency, available information shows that women have been overly excluded through this exercise.

Rife with questions of unconstitutionality and illegality, practical difficulties and predictable implementation errors, the whole SIR process may seem bizarre to any unbiased observer. All of this poses a simple question for the people of Bihar and indeed all of India: Why did the ECI decide to conduct an exercise of such great scale and sensitivity on such short notice, just months before the state assembly elections?

Attempts to dismantle Indian democracy from within

Rights defenders and opposition leaders have approached the Supreme Court, claiming that the SIR exercise appears to be in plain contravention of previous orders of the Court in some cases, where the burden of proving non-citizenship was on the State. (Lal Babu Hussein and Others vs Electoral Registration Officer and Others - 1995 AIR 1189). The Court, while stating that it will intervene if mass exclusion occurs and issuing a significant and necessary interim order protecting people’s rights, has not halted the SIR. This places the SIR squarely within a deeply worrying trend: the dismantling of Indian democracy from within.

Institutions like the Election Commission of India have been granted constitutional autonomy for a reason. Autonomous institutions, acting independently yet in balance, are the backbone of any functioning democracy. What we are witnessing now is the systematic collapse of these institutions, one after another. In recent years, the ECI – once central to making India the world’s largest electoral democracy, seems to have fallen prey to this dangerous erosion.

Recently held state elections have provided cause for very serious concern regarding the fairness of the electoral process. Not only leaders of opposition parties, but also independent experts and critics have cast doubt on the fairness of the Election Commission’s functioning.

The state elections in Maharashtra held in late 2024 are a case in point. The state saw a highly anomalous voter increase in five months between the Lok Sabha elections and state assembly elections, leading to the total tally of voters exceeding the population estimate in the state. An investigation in Nagpur revealed that these changes crossed thresholds that merit cross verification by the Commission in as many as 70% of polling booths in the constituency, adding credence to opposition claims that this was not mere manipulation but industrial-scale rigging of elections in a state that saw a reversal of political fortunes in only five months.

Recently, the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi has made detailed allegations demonstrating egregious misconduct in Karnataka elections. Using ECI’s own data, he claimed 1,00,000 plus bogus voters registered in a single constituency under the oversight of the Commission. Rather than addressing the concerns raised, and either countering the evidence provided, the ECI has taken a hostile stance, challenging Gandhi to file a sworn affidavit with the claims he has made. If the Leader of Opposition is treated with such hostility, one can only imagine the fate of ordinary citizens at the hands of such a callous regime and compromised institutions.

Understanding Bihar SIR in the context of ongoing fascist onslaught in India:

Actively attacking the basis of solidarity among working people is the hallmark of fascistic parties. BJP’s dominance corresponds with the fomenting of social discord and divisions in society. While its rule has seen the rise of unprecedented inequality and the consolidation of oligarchic power in the country, it has attacked India’s diverse, pluralist society by means of a vicious politics of violent majoritarianism.

Bihar is a case in point. Home to millions of restive unemployed youth, an agrarian economy in perineal distress, glaringly deficient public infrastructure and distress migration a common theme across the state, Bihar desperately requires a government to deliver a new economic deal.

However, elections under BJP rule see the Home Minister vitiate the environment by raising the bogey of illegal immigrants in the state instead. Without providing any evidence of the same, the ECI has also included this as a reason for conducting its ill-conceived exercise with “sources” claiming they are weeding out illegal immigrants from the rolls. This acts as a dog whistle, indicating to its supporters that the targets of the exercise are minorities and those opposed to the ruling party. Thus, the BJP effectively fractures democratic opposition to its efforts at voter suppression.

In reality, what is unfolding before us is a systematic plot to disenfranchise millions of poor Indians from their fundamental right to vote. The ruling party is using the bureaucratic machinery of the state to fundamentally alter the institutional setup of Indian democracy. After coming to power, especially under Modi, it has sought to expressly use state machinery to further this twin process of strengthening oligarchic power and creating social discord.

Since the second term of the “Modi government”, it has been clear that there is a design to create a long-term rift in Indian society by casting doubt on the citizenship of the working poor, especially muslims and members of the minority communities. This was evident in the changes to the Citizenship laws made through the Citizenship Amendment Act and the proposed National Register of Citizens (CAA-NRC) in 2019. The NRC was halted due to people’s steadfast resistance to it. Through ill-conceived exercises like the SIR in Bihar – which the ECI has said will be extended to all states in India, the regime is creating the groundwork for NRC.

The Challenge Before Us:

The SIR in Bihar is a test case for democracy in the country. It is an experiment to end universal franchise, which, if successful in Bihar, will be performed across the country. It is thus up to all democratic organisations and individuals in India (not just Bihar) to understand the threat and mobilize to defuse it, by rejecting the SIR. The regime has openly challenged the people of the country, it is now up to the people to respond.

In the past couple of months, various on-ground initiatives have intensified their efforts to expose and challenge the SIR. Grassroots and independent media have done exemplary work in highlighting the numerous flaws in the entire process. NAPM Bihar member organisations have been actively campaigning, spreading awareness and ground truthing the whole exercise and jointly organised a well-attended and publicised Public Hearing on July 21^st in Patna, highlighting several problems and mass scale disenfranchisement in the process. 

Considering the gravity of the entire issue, NAPM demands that:

The Election Commission of India (ECI) must:

1. Immediately suspend and fully stop the ill-conceived, undemocratic and unconstitutional process of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) being undertaken in Bihar.

2. Undertake a transparent and inclusive voter registration exercise, facilitating the right to vote for all Indians, in keeping with its constitutional mandate.

3. Refrain from replicating an unconstitutional exercise similar to the SIR-Bihar in any other part / state of the country, in the future.

Hon’ble Supreme Court must:

4. Penalise the errant officials at the Election Commission of India for devising and conducting an exercise to disenfranchise voters.

5. Conduct a court monitored probe into allegations of electoral fraud and rigging.

6. Take a timely, fair and holistic view on the constitutionality of this entire exercise and direct ECI not to do anything that erodes the right to vote of lakhs of citizens.

Issued by: National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM)