Supreme Court Reserves Judgment On Pleas Questioning Legality Of SIR

The Supreme Court today reserved the decision on a batch of petitions challenging the legality of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls done by the Election Commission of India across several states. The Court is examining whether the ECI has the powers under Article 326 of the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Rules made thereunder to carry out the SIR in the present form.The bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi reserved the matter after a long-standing period of hearings since November 2025. Simply put, the SIR is a process which aims to create electoral rolls from scratch. In the process, a comprehensive update and verification of the voters on the rolls is done by the ECI at grass-root level. The ECI's officials, known as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) would be carrying out house-to-house enumeration, which includes the collection of enumeration forms and intensive verification of entries.As per the SIR notification, voters, who were not present in the 2002 (or 2003 rolls in some states) rolls, have to show ancestral linkage with someone who was present in the 2002/03 roll. Eleven documents were specified by the ECI as documents which can be used to verify identity. Later, the Supreme Court ordered the inclusion of Aadhaar card as well.Most of the petitions were filed in June last year following the ECI's decision to conduct SIR in Bihar. In October last year, the ECI decided to extend SIR to States and Union Territories such as Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.Over 13 petitioners, including NGOs, leaders from various political parties and individual activists, have filed pleas challenging the SIR process. These include- the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) (lead petitioner), PUCL, Yogendra Yadav, Mahua Moitra (TMC MP), Manoj Jha (RJD MP), KC Venugopal(Congress MP), Supriya Sule (NCP SP), to name a few.Arguments By The Petitioners The main contentions raised by the petitioners was that : (1) the SIR was an indirect 'NRC-like process', making ECI a de facto authority to verify citizenship. The petitioners argued that wherever doubts on the eligibility of the voter are raised, they have to be dealt with as per the process laid down under S.16 of the RP Act.S. 16(1) of the Act states that a person is disqualified from the electoral roll if it is proven that (1) he is not a citizen of India; (2) he is of unsound mind or declared so; (3) he is disqualified from voting under any law relating to corrupt practises and offences related to elections.However, by the process of SIR, the ECI creates a temporary list of voters and puts the burden on the individuals to prove through specific documents that they are citizens in order to be on the voters' list. The petitioners emphasised that the issue of determining whether a person is a citizen or not lies in the domain of the Central Government and Foreigners Tribunals through S. 8 and 9 of the Citizenship Act.(2) Consequent to the argument on how ECI does not have the power to determine citizenship, the petitioners went on to contend that deletion of names from the rolls would cause a perilous situation of a 'suspended citizenship'; (3) The petitioners pointed out that the enumeration forms, which are required to be filled and verified in the present SIR process, have no statutory backing as per the RP Act or Rules. (4) The petitioners stressed that S. 21(3) did not allow for a blanket SIR to be conducted. The phrase “ direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency” cannot be interpreted to mean a group of states - this would lead to 'massification' of a process done only under exceptional circumstances and for individual constituencies or a part of it; (5) Further, the ECI has not assigned state-specific reasons to carry out SIR in different states. It was also alleged that the procedure of SIR lacks transparency, and several inconsistent instances were pointed out where voters were either not given reasons for deletion or there seemed to be an unexplainable increase in the names after the deletions were carried out. A detailed explainer on the petitioners' side of the argument can be read here.Senior Advocates Kapil Sibal, Dr AM Singhvi, Gopal Sankaranarayanan, Shadan Farast, PC Sen, Raju Ramachandran, Advocates Prashant Bhushan, Vrinda Grover, Nizam Pasha, Sharukh Alam etc appeared for various petitioners.Arguments By The ECI The ECI countered that the claim of verification of citizenship by the petitioners was to be seen through the lens of electoral purposes. The verification was not with the intent to deport non-citizens. The ECI also argued that the process of verification was a 'liberal, soft-touch' approach and did not involve a rigorous investigation per se.The ECI also countered the reliance placed by the...

Supreme Court Reserves Judgment On Pleas Questioning Legality Of SIR

Anmol Kaur Bawa

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