Mainstream Weekly.
Dearth of documents and obscurity as to the domicile and citizenship status of huge number of people generated confusion and consternation during the preparation of India’s first electoral roll. Ornit Shani in her How India Became Democratic (2017) highlighted one representation that urged the central authority to fix “vision first and revision afterwards". Obviously, the vision dictates the mission, which then influences the outcome.
The vision of the Election Commission of India (EC) had for decades been to act as the ’custodian of inclusion’ and the mission was to ensure that ‘no voter gets excluded’ from the electoral roll (ER). However, the reoriented postulate of the EC now holds the tenet that no ineligible one is included in the ER.
The contrast and dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion axes manifest in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which the Supreme Court of India accepts as a “far more rigorous and comprehensive process of verification." The SIR, already completed in 14 states/UTs, has the inimitable objective and mission, and it has profoundly impacted the very conception of democratic citizenship.
The EC’s notifications and affidavits explain the intent of the SIR. The absence of intensive revision since 2003 has led to rampant distortion and inaccuracies in the ERs. Moreover, the cumulative effects of rapid urbanisation, massive intra-state and inter-state migration, non-reporting of deaths, duplicate enrolments and large-scale illegal immigration warrant an exhaustive overhauling of the ER.
Nonetheless, the credo of SIR is intrinsically exclusionary. The deduction is that an accurate, updated and authentic ER is the cornerstone of representative government and “fair roll leads to fair poll” and “strengthen democracy.” Thus, purging for purification seems its singular motto. The intent to detect bogus names arising out of migration, death, duplication and infiltration would inevitably lead to flushing out a huge number of ineligible entries from the ER. Otherwise, SIR exercise would prove hollow or contrived. Expectedly, the SIR exercise has struck out an unprecedented extent of electors—7 crore already and total 11 crore at the present rate.
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The ingrained method buttresses the bleaching mission of the SIR. The preparation of ER starts from a clean slate. Each and every one is to apply for inclusion. This effectively rebuts the erstwhile presumed citizenship and puts each under the scanner. One will find a place in the roll only if the entitlement is authenticated by the documentary evidence. When the SIR discards the prevailing architecture built and fine-tuned over decades, it is more than a customary revision. SY Quereshi, former Chief Election Commissioner, has rightly argued that the Supreme Court of India has been impervious to this demolition overdrive while delivering its judgement on the SIR in Bihar, 2026.
Never ever in history had the EC expressed such a level of abhorrence to its own ER, termed the ER grossly inaccurate or spurious, cast doubt over each entry of the ER and conceived and operationalised an expansive cleansing drive on an urgent basis at the national level and that too without taking the stakeholders on board. The EC’s present stance is strange, especially when the erstwhile ERs were deemed reasonably accurate and legitimate. No less unusual is the insensitivity of the EC to its obligation to uphold the constitutional right to vote particularly when crores of people are getting excluded.
Sanitisation of ER is undoubtedly sensible and compelling. But intricacies and predicaments get confounded when the avowed objective is not buttressed by statistical or empirical data or evidence attesting to the scale of migration, death, duplication or immigrants and when the very means becomes the end.
It is instructive to emphasise that the EC’s claim on migration, for instance, appears incoherent when the post-SIR rolls are considered as the case in point. Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat have contrasting migration patterns: in-migration for the latter (also Kerala) and out-migration for the former. Yet, both states account for a 17 per cent exclusion rate.
The purported distortions in the preceding ERs raise troubling retrospective quandaries.
Given the supposed nadir the erstwhile ERs reached, why, then, did the EC remain oblivious to the accumulating inaccuracies? What prevented the EC from undertaking purifying initiatives for decades?
What about the culpability of the government apparatus and officials involved in conducting summary and intensive reviews during this long span? Can the EC shrug off its overseeing failure?
When the succeeding state and union governments had been formed on the basis of inaccurate ERs and, by extension, bogus voting and they took major policy decisions during their tenures, did not a serious level of legitimacy crisis engulf and vitiate the preceding governance edifice?
However, the anecdotes downplay the avowal of the EC and inversely point to a discreet linkage of the SIR with the prevailing political postulates. The SIR may be one clever and circuitous modality having an indirect relation with the proclaimed political canon of identifying the Ghuspetiyas. Rather than the contentious National Register of Citizens, push for the SIR just as a drive to disinfect the otherwise convoluted electoral canvas could appear innocuous, thus least renouncing, yet could fill the same bill.
One dominant political and campaign narrative of the BJP relates to the clamour over massive infiltration from neighbouring Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal. On the 79th Independence Day, 2025 Prime Minister declared, "As part of a deliberate conspiracy, the demography of the country is being altered. These infiltrators are snatching away the livelihoods of our youth. This will not be tolerated." Participating in the two-day debate in Lok Sabha, Home Minister Amit Shah asserted: “Infiltrators cannot decide who will be the Prime Minister and Chief Minister of the country;” and the SIR will be used to accomplish the government’s policy of “detect, delete, and deport” infiltrators.
The BIP leaders of West Bengal reiterated that more than one crore infiltrators are in the state and those are to be identified and deported so that they do not influence the electoral outcome. The BJP manifesto for the West Bengal election, 2026, promised the prevention of illegal infiltration and silent demographic invasion and the implementation of the “detect, delete and deport model” for infiltrators. However, there is no official or other disclosure or information as to the number of illegal immigrants living in or the SIR exercise so far identified.
When the constitutional role of the EC is directed to effectuate the partisan policy of the ruling government and when crores of Indians get excluded from the political architecture, India is set for a newer form of constitutional democracy with a chosen sort of political community