THE BIHAR MODEL
Sagar
THE CENSUS TOWN OF SABOUR, on the outskirts of Bhagalpur, was first connected by rail to the colonial capital, Calcutta, in 1861. Five years later, the first train between Howrah and Delhi—the precursor of the Kalka Mail—passed through here. The East Indian Railway Company, however, began constructing what came to be known as the Grand Chord, which, when completed in 1906, shortened the distance between the two metropolises by almost two hundred kilometres.
This section, which bypassed Bhagalpur, eventually became part of India’s busiest railway line. The industrial hubs of Asansol and Durgapur were developed along the Grand Chord, as were the coal mines of Dhanbad. Sabour did not see any such development. Today, its station is almost exclusively used by slow passenger trains, and its economy depends on agriculture. Life here is unhurried, with familiar routines often carrying more weight than national headlines.
One such routine was unfolding on a drizzly afternoon in July. As he often does, 75-year-old Radhe Yadav was sitting in a small hut where his friend lives and works as a tailor in the village of Sultanpur Bhitthi, near the Sabour railway station. His friend was on the floor, eating his lunch, while Radhe, seated on a chair, looked out at the rain. I asked him if he had enrolled himself in the voter list under the Election Commission of India’s ongoing Special Intensive Revision process. “I’ve been voting since 1970,” he told me. Yes, but had he filled out the enumeration form that the ECI was asking every voter to submit? Radhe squinted at me, confused. None of the booth-level officers mobilised by the ECI to carry out the exercise had visited him yet, even though it was the third week of the SIR, which is meant to verify the eligibility of each of Bihar’s 79 million voters. He could not understand why he needed to enrol again, since he was already registered.
Radhe’s friend Narad Yadav had just arrived at the hut. He said that he had seen a local schoolteacher distributing papers. The teacher had told him that it was for a census and that he would soon be visiting Narad’s village, English Farka. I told Radhe and Narad that there had not been a census in fourteen years and that the ECI was putting together a new electoral roll, but this did not make sense to them. I asked Radhe if he had the documents required for the one-page citizenship declaration that every voter was expected to submit to the BLOs by the end of July. “Yes, I have Aadhaar,” he said. When I told him that Aadhaar cards were not among the documents listed as acceptable by the ECI, he bristled. “That’s just what you are saying. Whenever we go for any work, they just ask for our Aadhaar card.”
Around nine out of every ten people were unaware of the mandate and purpose of the SIR.
Neither Narad nor Farku Sao, a restaurant owner in his early fifties who had been listening to our conversation, could understand why Aadhaar cards were not valid, but the little they had heard about the SIR—and what I was saying—worried them. Sao hurried off to meet his local councillor to find out what he needed to do, unaware that municipal authorities have no role in the process. The BLOs are the sole custodians of the enumeration forms. Until they visit, most voters can do nothing but wait, unless they know how to download and submit the forms online. According to the Bihar government’s 2023 caste survey, only 1.15 percent of the state’s population, and 0.37 percent of Scheduled Castes, have access to a computer with internet access.
On 9 and 10 July, I visited around half a dozen villages in Sabour and Araria, a flood-prone district in Bihar’s Seemanchal region. Around nine out of every ten people I spoke to were unaware of the mandate and purpose of the SIR. Even more concerning, none of them seemed to understand the consequences of being excluded from the process. The few who were aware lived in predominantly upper-caste neighbourhoods such as Sabour’s Brahmin Tola. Most people had not been visited by a BLO. Those who had spoken to a BLO had been misinformed that an Aadhaar or voter identification card would suffice.
Next to the tailor’s shop in Sultanpur Bhitthi was a roadside kiosk, whose owner, Amit Kumar Paswan, almost froze when I mentioned the enumeration form and the documents required. He had no idea about any of it. I moved on to another hut down the road, where Meena Ram, a Dalit woman in her fifties, runs a tea shop. The shop supports a family of six, including a grandson whose mother died during the COVID-19 pandemic. Meena, who was born in West Bengal and is not registered to vote, did not know the process or what documents were required. The BLO who had visited her a couple of days earlier had not told her anything about what she needed to do.
Meena’s neighbour Khushbu Devi, a 30-year-old Dalit woman, had a similar story. She runs a vegetable shop that supports a family of six. She and her husband, Dilip, a daily-wage labourer, are not registered voters. They knew nothing about the SIR process and did not have any of the required documents. Their shop, which also doubles as their home, was built on government land. The BLO had told her, she said, that they could not be enrolled because of this reason.
THE ECI ORDERED the SIR on 24 June, four months before Bihar is scheduled to hold its next assembly election, to ensure “that no eligible citizen is left out while no ineligible person is included in the Electoral Roll.” It did so under the provisions of Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, which states that a constituency’s voter list must be revised before every election and empowers the ECI to direct revisions at any time. According to Section 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, the ECI may direct that the rolls be revised “either intensively or summarily or partly intensively and partly summarily.” A summary revision requires making amendments to a draft electoral roll, while an intensive revision requires preparing it afresh.
Bihar’s electoral roll was last updated on 6 January, after the ECI carried out a Special Summary Revision. This is an annual exercise that is only mentioned in the commission’s manual, rather than in the relevant legislation. The former chief election commissioner OP Rawat told The Wire that the word “special” is used by the ECI “when they do not conform to the template of the revision under the law but tinker with certain elements.” In the case of an SSR, he said, the word is used to allow for “a truncated exercise” that does not follow the timeline prescribed in the rules for collecting and adjudicating on objections to the draft electoral roll. Similarly, an intensive revision “means house-to-house surveys, filling up of the forms by the BLO, among others. Since all of those things have been done away with—basically, pre-filled forms are being distributed—they are calling it a Special Intensive Revision.”
The forms being distributed by the BLOs during the SIR already contained the names and Electoral Photo Identity Card numbers of the voters, their polling station, their assembly constituency and district. Voters had to affix a photograph to the form and fill in their date of birth, as well as the names and EPIC numbers of their parents. They also had to affirm that they are an Indian citizen and attach proof of citizenship.
This last requirement was the most pernicious. The process divided all voters into two categories: those who had been included in the 2003 electoral roll, and those who had not. The ECI did not provide any justification for why 2003 was selected as the cutoff year, other than that being the last time an intensive revision was carried out—rendering all subsequent SSRs pointless, a waste of time and resources. Those who had been registered voters in 2003 only had to submit the page of that year’s electoral roll that contained their name. According to a list made available to BLOs and uploaded online a week after the SIR began, there were 49.6 million such voters. The remaining 30 million were asked to provide at least one of a stipulated 11 documents to prove their citizenship. These did not include Aadhaar cards, EPICs, ration cards or those issued under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme.
Those who had not been included in the 2003 electoral roll were further divided into three categories. If they were born in India before 1 July 1987, they only needed to furnish proof of their date and place of birth using some combination of the 11 documents. If they had been born between 1 July 1987 and 2 December 2004, they had to provide proof not just for themselves but also for one of their parents. Those born after this period had to do so for themselves and for both parents.
The ECI appears to be carrying out a de facto NRC without any sort of legislation or executive order.
Most of the 11 documents in the ECI’s list, which the order said was indicative and not exhaustive, are possessed by negligible minorities of the Bihar electorate. Around two percent of the state’s population have passports and birth certificates, while just over 2 million people have government jobs, whose identity cards and house allotment certificates can be furnished as proof of citizenship. Even fewer people have domicile or forest rights certificates, or enough property to necessitate partition through creating a family register. The National Register of Citizens, meanwhile, is only applicable to Assam. Those who did not already appear in the 2003 electoral roll are unlikely to have identity cards, documents or certificates issued by government organisations before 1 July 1987. That leaves just two options: caste certificates, which have been issued to about a fifth of the state’s Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes, and less than forty percent of Scheduled Tribes; and matriculation or college certificates, in a state where less than half of the population under the age of forty, and around a tenth of those between forty and sixty years old, have completed school.
The choice of documents is troubling. Like the poll taxes and literacy tests used to restrict the right to vote in segregationist societies, the ECI’s requirements make it easier for the rich and the educated to enrol, undermining the universal adult franchise that has been a cornerstone of Indian democracy since Independence. The onerous restrictions also disguise a partisan divide, since upper-caste voters, whose historical monopoly over wealth and education places them at a distinct advantage, have favoured the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party in recent elections. This segment of society has never been large enough for the BJP to win a majority in Bihar on its own, but the SIR could provide an opening for it to remake the electorate as it sees fit.
These fears are not eased by the ECI’s diminishing autonomy. Like most other democratic institutions, it has appeared to bend to the will of the Narendra Modi government over the past decade, raising questions over the motivations behind this sudden decision to conduct this exercise. The SIR, as conceived by the ECI’s order, is truly unprecedented. Although intensive revisions have been conducted several times before—until the digitisation of electoral rolls made them redundant—past iterations never demanded proof of citizenship and were never carried out in such short durations, so close to an election.
Moreover, the ECI’s plans are not restricted to Bihar. The 24 June order made it clear that the commission had “decided to begin the Special Intensive Revision in the entire country,” and the chief electoral officer of West Bengal, which is scheduled to go to the polls in May 2026, has reportedly instructed state officials to begin preparing for a similar exercise. This has grave implications. While those left out of Bihar’s electoral roll would not be able to vote during the assembly election later this year, disenfranchisement might not be the only consequence.
The ECI’s cutoff dates of 1 July 1987 and 2 December 2004 are based on the definition of birthright citizenship under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, which was passed by the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to lay the groundwork for an NRC throughout the country. That exercise was never carried out, but, by adopting its citizenship test for the SIR, the ECI appears to have taken on the onus of carrying out a de facto NRC without any sort of legislation or even an executive order. The ECI’s directive stipulates that if a person’s eligibility cannot be proved during the SIR, “due to non-submission of requisite documents or otherwise,” officials may designate them as “suspected foreign nationals” and refer them to “the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955.”
ON 27 JULY, the ECI issued a press release claiming that 72.4 million voters had submitted their enumeration forms. These forms would be digitised, and the names would be included in the draft electoral roll prepared on 1 August. The release suggested that around 6.5 million names were at risk of being struck off—2.2 million had died; 3.6 million were now registered to vote in other states and union territories, were not found to exist or did not submit their form in time; and seven hundred thousand were enrolled at multiple places.
The ECI achieved this “overwhelming participation” by making a series of compromises on the documents required for the citizenship declaration. A BLO in Sabour told me that in the first few days of the exercise, they could not find people who had any of the 11 documents. “The work was very slow,” they said. “We could not do more than one household a day.” Another BLO, in Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s home district of Nalanda, recalled receiving multiple instructions from their superiors during the first week of July. “First, they told us to take house tax receipts as proof, then said that we can also take bank passbooks.” On 5 July, a press release by the state’s chief electoral officer noted that, as of 7 pm that evening, only 11.2 million enrolment forms had been collected, of which just 2.39 million had been uploaded to the centralised database.
Both BLOs told me that, around this time, they were told to stop worrying about the documents and just accept Aadhaar cards and EPICs. As a registered voter in Bihar, I was visited by a BLO in the first week of July. They asked me to only attach my Aadhaar card to the form. I uploaded the application online. After doing so, the confirmation message on the screen told me that a BLO would visit my home to verify the details. A few days later, I called up my BLO to inform them about the submission. They said that they had been asked to upload the forms without any documents, since that could be done later, and that they would probably not need to verify my details until after the process was over. There was no way for me to check my application status. The voters’ portal only provided a tracking service for enrolment forms two days before the 25 July deadline, and the ECI helpline remained defunct throughout July.
Rather than accuracy, the priority at this point seemed to be meeting the unrealistic target set by the ECI of completing the process by the end of the month. A press release issued on 6 July claimed that 6.5 million forms had been received in the past 24 hours alone. It added that voters could submit their documents at any time before 25 July. “After publication of draft Electoral Rolls, if any document is deficient, EROs”—electoral registration officers—“can obtain such documents, from the electors whose name appears in the draft Electoral Rolls, during scrutiny in the Claims and Objection period.” A subsequent press release, issued on 12 July, was more unambiguous. While it was preferable that voters submit their documents along with the enrolment forms, it said, if they needed more time, they could “submit them separately till 30 Aug i.e. the last date of filing claims and objections and take help of volunteers as well.”
Rather than accuracy, the ECI’s priority seemed to be meeting its unrealistic target of completing the process by the end of the month.
As of 6 pm that day, the release noted, 63.3 million forms had been received, accounting for 80.1 percent of the total electorate. This meant that, over the previous week, the BLOs and agents of the state’s 12 major political parties had been enrolling an average of 7.44 million voters every day—around a hundred per day for every polling booth. Their methods seemed suspicious. On 12 July, I noticed that my in-laws were listed on the ECI portal as already enrolled, even though neither of them had applied online or been visited by a BLO. A few days later, Dainik Bhaskar reported that many voters had been enrolled without their knowledge. The report quoted anonymous ECI officials who said that they were themselves filling the forms of those whose names appeared in the 2003 electoral roll.
A volunteer who was helping upload forms in Nalanda district told me, in the first week of July, that ECI officials were scheduled to visit on 8 July. The volunteer is a teacher at a government school and had started working the previous day. The district magistrate, they said, had ordered that each polling booth should have enrolled at least eight hundred voters by the time of the visit. (A polling booth typically has around twelve hundred voters.) This was an “impossible number,” the volunteer said. The server to which they were uploading forms was slow, and their phones often overheated because they had to keep their cameras on throughout, in order to scan the enumeration forms. “I am able to process around sixty forms a day,” they added. Even if they increased this to a hundred a day, they could not meet the target in time for the ECI visit.
“No training was given,” the volunteer said. “When I came to the village, I read a lot of brochures on what documents are needed, because the BLO here often disappears for hours. He is absent right now. He comes and asks me everything. Until yesterday, I didn’t know what we should accept and what we should reject.” They could not make corrections, since their job was just to upload what the BLO had collected. When I spoke to the volunteer again, on 12 July, they complained that their instructions were changing every day. “Until yesterday evening, they were telling us to just add the mobile number and forget about their parents’ documents. Now, they are telling us to just upload the forms we receive, even if they are blank—no card number, no constituency number, not even serial numbers. What can we do? They are standing on our heads, telling us that the numbers should increase.”
Earlier that day, the volunteer said, “I saw some BLOs gather four–five children and ask them to sign some forms. They told them, ‘This is a Dalit, so put your thumb impression. That one is from a forward caste, so sign the form. These are from a Manjhi village, so put a thumb impression.’” I sent questions about these irregularities to the chief election commissioner, the chief electoral officer of Bihar and the district magistrate of Nalanda. The latter two did not respond. Instead of answering my questions, the ECI pointed me to its 24 June order and 27 June press release, as well as to its X handle. It added that it “does not take any responsibility of any other misinformation or unsubstantiated allegations being floated around by some vested interests.”
DURING THE DAY I spent in Sabour, I accompanied a BLO to observe the enumeration process. It was two weeks into the SIR process, so I asked them why they were still distributing forms. “People don’t know how to fill the forms,” the BLO said. “If they lose it, I will be held responsible. So I have them filled on the spot and collect them.” The ECI order had specified that each voter should be given two copies of the enumeration form—they were to return one copy and keep the other—and that the BLO should visit their home at least thrice in order to collect the completed form. During my reporting, however, I did not find a single person who had received some sort of acknowledgement that their form had been received.
That day, however, I witnessed the agony of the BLOs and their assistants, who are drawn from a pool of government schoolteachers, anganwadi workers, women’s self-help groups and volunteers from the National Cadet Corps, the National Service Scheme and the Nehru Yuva Kendra. We visited a Brahmin man living with his wife and mother. Their eldest son was living with his wife in another state, while the two younger children were studying outside Bihar. It took almost half an hour for them to contact the three children and receive their photographs and EPIC numbers. The daughter-in-law did not have the required details about her parents, so her form was left incomplete.
The BLO was carrying a physical copy of the 2003 electoral roll, which had more than a hundred pages, and had to manually go through it to find the names of the family members who were old enough to appear in it. It was a mess—the serial numbers in the electoral roll rarely tallied with the ones on the enumeration forms. As a result, the only way to verify whether someone’s name was present in the list was if their father’s name was correct. The names of the family’s matriarch and the daughter-in-law could not be found. The BLO did not ask for any documents, because their supervisor had told them it was unnecessary.
It took the BLO almost two hours to wrap up. I pointed out that, even if they worked twelve hours, it would be impossible for them to get through ten households a day. “Even doing forty forms in a day is difficult,” they said, but their supervisor was asking them to collect a hundred every day. While leaving the house, the BLO took a selfie with the family and sent it to a WhatsApp group, as instructed. They also had to provide an update every hour.
Later that day, I spoke to the BLO’s supervisors: two contract workers employed by the state government whose temporary office was a classroom. They told me that the phone application they were using was having frequent problems. “Sometimes it doesn’t work,” one of them said. “There’s an issue every hour, because so many people are using it at the same time.” They said that they were collecting enumeration forms from the five BLOs they were overseeing and uploading them during the night. “The app works fine after midnight.”
Because the opacity of the process, it is unclear what will happen once the final electoral roll is published.
The supervisors had a target of uploading two hundred forms every day. I asked them if they thought that it was realistic to distribute, collect and upload forms from 79 million voters within a month. One of them laughed. “If you ask me, there never should have been a time limit for this,” they said. The other supervisor thought about it for a moment. “My personal opinion is that this work should have been done six or seven months ago,” they said. “And the corrections of names and ages should have been done during the collection stage itself.” This was an important point. It is well known that EPICs often have errors. In 2019, when I was interviewing people designated as “doubtful voters” during the creation of the NRC in Assam, I found that many of them had been excluded due to errors in their government documents—even spelling mistakes had been grounds for their citizenship to be jeopardised. The SIR is not officially an NRC. But, because of the opacity of the process, it is unclear what will happen once the final electoral roll is published.
Relaxing the requirements on which documents would be acceptable for the citizenship declaration might have helped the ECI meet the unrealistic deadline it had set itself, but it does little to ease fears of disenfranchisement—or, worse, of being rendered stateless. After all, the relaxation was merely implemented through oral instructions to BLOs rather than by amending the ECI’s 24 June order. The original list of 11 documents remains in force, with the caveat that voters have been given an additional month to submit them, even though, for most people, they remain as far out of reach as before. This grace period was, again, not codified by an order but mentioned in a press release. The order empowers electoral registration officers and their assistants to “start a suo moto inquiry” against any voter “due to non-submission of requisite documents or otherwise.”
The absurdity of the timeline becomes even more obvious if one tries to make an estimate of the amount of time available for scrutinising the submitted form. Between 1 August and 1 September, 243 EROs and 2,976 AEROs are expected to evaluate over 72 million forms, which comes to around seven hundred forms per person per day. Assuming they work twelve hours a day, they would have a minute to look at each form and determine whether the applicant has satisfactorily proven their citizenship status. Instead, it is much more likely that they will only look at any claims and objections raised about the presence of certain names in the electoral roll. This leaves the door open for political parties to seek to purge people unlikely to vote for them. Since only a small portion of the forms are likely to have the requisite documents, it would not be hard to reject applications—and, were the ECI to act in a partisan manner, it could conceivably make significant alterations to the roll before the assembly election.
BRAHMIN TOLA IS SITUATED barely a kilometre from where I had met Radhe, Meena and Khushbu, all of whom belong to historically oppressed communities. It is a common practice in Bihar for neighbourhoods to be named after castes. Most, but not all, residents were Brahmins. The neighbourhood was visibly cleaner, with better houses, roads and public facilities. Munni Devi, one of the residents, told me that their BLO had already visited and collected their forms. She was aware of the 11 documents needed for those not on the 2003 electoral roll. When I asked her how she knew about them, she said that the BLO had explained this to everyone.
I also met Shyam Mahato, a pratinidhi—representative—of the local councillor who also lived in Brahmin Tola. Although it is not an official designation, pratinidhis of elected officials are common throughout Bihar. Male politicians often take on the job in order to exercise power in constituencies reserved for women. Shyam was fully aware of the documents required for different categories of voters during the SIR and told me that everyone in the neighbourhood had already submitted their forms. Brahmin Tola was the only locality I visited in Sabour where this was the case.
The scenario was very different when I crossed the road to Muslim Tola, or a kilometre further to Dalit households in Babupur, near the banks of the Ganges. Hashim, a 70-year-old resident of Muslim Tola, was gathering his neighbours’ details and supplying them to the BLO. He told me that the BLO did not know people in the area and was, therefore, relying on him for help. The residents I spoke to did not know about the documents required for the SIR. They told me that they had given their EPICs and Aadhaar cards to Hashim. When I asked Hashim why he was not collecting the documents required for the citizenship declaration, he said he did not know about them. He was, however, aware that if they were excluded from the electoral roll, their citizenship status might come under question.
The residents of Babupur were neither aware of the process nor the consequences of exclusion. Most of them had not even been visited by the BLO. When I reached the neighbourhood, a group of ten women surrounded me, asking all sorts of questions about the SIR. “Where exactly does one get that form?” Manju Devi asked me. Another woman, who refused to give me her name, recalled having seen the BLO sit at the local temple that day. “She asked me to come with my Aadhaar, ration card and passbook tomorrow, and she will fill my form,” the woman said. While I spoke with residents, a middle-aged man pulled me out of the crowd and took me to see a broken handpump. “Sir, nobody listens to us,” he said. “Please get it fixed.” He was disappointed when I said that I was only here to talk about the SIR. Most people were either unaware of the process or had gone to the temple or the community hall to meet the BLO.
On my way to Araria, the following day, I stopped at a brick kiln at Bakhri, a village in Katihar district near the confluence of the Ganges and the Kosi. Of the dozen labourers working there, only one had heard of the SIR. Balkrishan Mandal had heard about it from a relative. He told me that he had taken a day off, for which he would not be paid, to go to his village and give his Aadhaar card and EPIC to his BLO in order to fill the enumeration form.
That afternoon, I was at the intersection in Majgawan, a village in the Diyari panchayat—my first stop in Araria district. A group of elderly residents had gathered there. As I began speaking to them, women, children and young voters gathered around me, curious and eager to join the conversation. “If the voter list is being remade, let it be, but where will we get the documents from before 1987 that they are asking for?” Khurshid, a 70-year-old resident, said. “We are poor people here. We earn our livelihood from manual labour. You can see our houses. Where will we get these documents from?”
No one seemed to believe in the integrity of the ECI. They held the government responsible for what they were facing.
Noor Hasan, another elderly resident, noted that Majgawan was located in a low-lying area. “The whole village was submerged in the flood that came in 2017,” he said. “Our homes were inundated. We don’t know where our documents got washed away.” Since most villagers were labourers, he added, they did not have matriculation certificates. “Didn’t the government issue the Aadhaar card? Now, if the government doesn’t accept this, how should we understand the government? If the government doesn’t acknowledge people, why should we acknowledge it?” I tried to make a distinction between the government and the ECI, but he was convinced they were the same. No one I met in Araria seemed to believe in the integrity of the ECI. They held the government responsible for what they were facing.
In the neighbouring village, Mohammad Mansoor, who has been a voter since 1975, explained how difficult it is for residents to get a caste or domicile certificate. “If we apply now, it will take at least two to three months,” he said. “The panchayat office is six kilometres away, while the district headquarters is nine kilometres.” Several residents of Diyari told me that the panchayat office was barely functioning. When I visited the office, I found an unplastered brick structure with no windows. Locals were using it to store hay. There was no staff to be seen.
Since most villagers were migrant labourers with no academic degrees, I asked if they had land documents. “I’m 75 years old and have a khatiyan”—an official record of landownership—“but what about my children?” Mohammad Nazir said. I asked him if he had a family register, one of the 11 acceptable documents. “I’ll have to give my sarpanch a lineage chart, giving details of my relatives and ancestors,” he replied. “It will then be forwarded to the tehsildar, who will order an inquiry.” There was no time for that.
During the SIR, BJP leaders have often been targeting Bihari Muslim voters as Bangladeshis. At Majgawan, Noor Hasan said that such accusations were “only the government’s way of thinking. There is no Bangladeshi here. If the government can come up with a new scheme, it can also catch Bangladeshis.” Tabrez Hasan, a former joint secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union who had recently joined the Congress in Araria, told me that the BJP was falsely raising the issue of Bangladeshi infiltrators in Bihar, much like it had demonised Rohingyas before the assembly election in Delhi. “They will try to target a particular ideology by using the Bangladeshi issue,” he said. “It is trying to get some mileage in the votes.” He added that the SIR might end up reducing the number of Muslim, Dalit and Adivasi voters in Araria.
“My constituency alone will lose forty percent voters due to the absence of their names in the 2003 electoral roll,” Mujahid Alam, a former Janata Dal (United) state legislator from Kochadhaman, in the neighbouring Kishanganj district, told me. “Farmers, labourers, Scheduled Castes and people from Backward Classes, who are mostly illiterate—the only valid documents they have are Aadhaar and voter ID.”
Later that day, I stopped by a Santhal village in the Diyari panchayat. The village was separated from the main road, and the other villages in Diyari, by a six-metre-wide canal that was as deep as “twice my height,” as one of the residents told me. The villagers had tied together bamboo shoots to create a makeshift bridge that they used to go to the market. Only one person could cross each section at a time.
In the village, I met Dhanai Hansdah, a resident in his late sixties. He was not aware of the SIR and told me that no BLO had visited the village. He did not have any documents other than an Aadhaar and a PAN card. There was no internet connectivity, and no one owned a laptop. Most people could only speak Santhali. Earlier, in Diyari’s sixth ward, I had met 60-year-old Sambulakha Khatun, who could read and write only Urdu. She had submitted her enumeration form but did not know what the BLO had filled in it.
When I called up the BLO for the Santhal village, Santosh Kumar Paswan, he asked me whether I was related to Hansdah, since I was so concerned about him being excluded from the electoral roll. After I convinced him that I was asking only in a journalistic capacity, he said that he was approaching the village from the other side and that I would have seen him had I waited another day.
THE SIR WAS CONTROVERSIAL from the very beginning. Opposition parties were quick to raise questions about the truncated timeline for the exercise and the potential for widespread purges. “In the name of updating the voters list, the EC is conspiring to deprive them of the right to vote in the upcoming elections in Bihar,” Rajesh Kumar, the president of the Bihar Pradesh Congress Committee, told the media, on 26 June. “This step has been taken by targeting the voters of the Congress and the Grand Alliance in a planned manner.” The Congress had already accused the ECI of manipulating electoral rolls to rig the 2024 assembly election in Maharashtra. In a subsequent interview with Frontline, Dipankar Bhattacharya, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) (Liberation), claimed that the chief election commissioner had told opposition leaders “that a lot of questions came up in Maharashtra, and that’s why we’re doing this.”
The BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi accused critics of the SIR of seeking to “rob Indian democracy on the back of foreign infiltrators.”
In a social-media post, the Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav accused Modi of having directed the ECI to carry out the exercise. “Frustrated at the prospect of electoral defeat, these people are now conspiring to strip Bihar and Biharis of their voting rights,” he wrote. “Under the guise of a Special Intensive Revision, they will cancel your vote so that a voter ID card cannot be made. Then, they will deprive you of ration, pension, reservation, scholarship and other schemes.”
Residents of a Santhal village in Araria district had tied together bamboo shoots to create a makeshift bridge that they used to go to the market. SIBTAIN HYDER FOR THE CARAVAN
During the monsoon session of the Bihar assembly, opposition legislators wore black and held protests against the SIR. Parliamentary proceedings were also disrupted several times over the issue. On 23 July, Tejashwi spoke about the opposition potentially boycotting the next assembly election. “If the election is conducted in a partial and manipulative manner,” he told the media, “where it is already decided who would win how many seats, what is the point of conducting such an election?”
There was opposition even from within the ruling coalition. While speaking to the media on 23 July, the JD(U) MP Giridhari Yadav described the SIR order as a “Tughlaqi firman”—a popular term for ill-conceived schemes, invoking disastrous diktats issued by the fourteenth-century ruler Muhammad bin Tughlaq. “The Election Commission has no practical knowledge,” he said. “It knows neither the history nor the geography of Bihar. It knows nothing.” He added that it had taken him ten days to gather the necessary documents to enrol himself and that the ECI “should have given six months of time” to carry out the exercise. Giridhari insisted that he was speaking in his personal capacity, but the JD(U) sent him a show-cause notice for embarrassing the party and lending “credibility to the baseless and politically motivated allegations made by the opposition.” In a subsequent interview, he defended himself by saying that Nitish “hasn’t made any statement on the SIR yet. Then how can you say that I have deviated from the party position?”
The most vocal support for the SIR came from the BJP. During a brief assembly discussion on the exercise, on 24 July, Nitish remained silent. Samrat Choudhary, one of the two deputy chief ministers from the BJP, heckled Tejashwi during the opposition leader’s speech, calling him the son of a criminal, but also made an assurance that there was no discrimination in the SIR on grounds of caste or religion, and that no “genuine voter” would be deprived of their rights.
A week earlier, however, Choudhary had suggested that there were many voters who were not genuine. In an interview with the Indian Express, he drew attention to the spike in applications for domicile certificates in Kishanganj district, from fewer than thirty thousand a month between January and June to over three hundred and forty thousand in the first two weeks of July. “The surge in demand for residential certificates suggests that many of the applicants are immigrants from other countries,” he said. “We suspect a sizeable percentage of the people in Kishanganj could be from Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan. Central and state governments and the EC should scrutinise and find out if illegal immigrants have been living in India stealthily.” He cast similar aspersions on Araria, Katihar and Purnia districts—all three, like Kishanganj, have large Muslim populations. According to an analysis by Scroll of data released by the chief electoral officer of Bihar, as of 16 July, these four districts had some of the highest numbers of unsubmitted enumeration forms, suggesting that any potential purge of the electoral roll would affect them the most.
Choudhary’s allegations were the sort of demonisation that Noor and Tabrez had been talking about. On 27 July, the BJP national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi made the line of attack even more explicit, accusing critics of the SIR of seeking to “rob Indian democracy on the back of foreign infiltrators.”
As with its allies, though, there was some internal concern within the BJP over the process. A member of a team carrying out a telephonic survey to mobilise support for the party before the upcoming election told the New Indian Express that over sixty percent of respondents “bluntly vented their anger against the party” over the SIR. A senior BJP leader estimated that up to a fifth of its supporters “would not be able to vote this time as they would not be able to furnish the required documents.” When asked about the concerns over the 11 documents in his Indian Express interview, Choudhary replied, “These are questions that are too technical. An ERO has the right to seek to be convinced after a voter has been issued notice for removal from electoral rolls. But the legal nitty-gritty of such questions can be explained better by the EC.”
POLITICAL THEATRICS ASIDE, the “legal nitty-gritty of such questions” was widely expected to be the realm in which the SIR would be settled. In early July, petitions were filed against the ECI in the Supreme Court by the Association of Democratic Reforms, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties and over a dozen opposition politicians. The petitioners asked the court to set aside the order, which, they argued, violated several articles of the Constitution and the statutes cited by the ECI itself.
According to the ADR petition, requiring a voter to prove the citizenship of their parents violated the right to universal adult franchise under Article 326, while the onerous requirements for documents, which “disproportionately affects marginalized communities, including Muslims, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and migrant workers,” went against Article 325’s prohibition of discrimination while preparing electoral rolls. It also cited court judgments that held that infringing on the right to vote violated Articles 14 (equality before the law), 19 (freedom of expression) and 21 (right to personal liberty). The PUCL petition noted that, when read together, Articles 324, 326, 327 and 328 charged the ECI “with enabling the right to vote for all adult citizens,” so it was incumbent upon the commission “to ensure that those with ‘document deficits,’ or other vulnerabilities relating to access and resources, do not get left out of the process.”
The Supreme Court does not have a stellar track record in recent times of effectively checking irregularities in the democratic process.
Besides these constitutional provisions, the ADR petition argued that Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 only allowed the ECI to order a revision of electoral rolls “for reasons to be recorded.” The 24 June order, it said, “lacks recorded reasons supported by any evidence or transparent methodology, rendering it arbitrary and thus liable to be struck down.” Moreover, excluding someone from the electoral roll simply because they had not submitted the requisite documents would violate the requirement for due process, under Section 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, since they would be denied “sufficient notice or opportunity to respond.”
The PUCL argued that, through the legislation and subsequent rules, parliament had envisioned a process for the preparation of electoral rolls that “relies on home-based contextual understanding and assessments before inclusion and not on impersonal documentation. Also, the burden of including people in the electoral rolls is with the EC. In one fell stroke, the EC’s executive order inverts the whole process—the burden of inclusion is shifted on to the marginalized voter, and also made document-centred.”
Both petitions criticised the ECI’s schedule for the SIR, with the ADR arguing that “there are many who may be able to procure the documents but the short timeline mentioned in [the] directive may preclude them from being able to supply the same within the time period.” The PUCL noted that the corners the ECI was cutting in order to meet its own deadline, such as scrutinising forms only after the creation of a draft electoral roll, “just pushes the process back but does not address the question of the illegality of the exercise.” It added that the appointment of booth-level agents to aid the ECI by political parties, “which vary vastly in numbers,” implied “a complete disbalance in the differential access to voters depending on their political affiliations.”
A division bench of Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi held a first hearing on 10 July. The judges framed the case in terms of three questions: whether the ECI had the right to undertake such an exercise, whether it was following the correct procedure and whether sufficient time had been allocated for the process. They directed the ECI to file a counter-affidavit by 21 July and not publish the draft electoral roll on 1 August. They also added that, since the list of required documents was not exhaustive, it would be “in the interest of justice” for the ECI to consider EPICs, Aadhaar and ration cards as proof for the citizenship declaration. The judges scheduled the next hearing for 28 July.
During the hearing, Dhulia had observed that it was the union home ministry, rather than the ECI, whose job it was to determine someone’s citizenship status. In its affidavit, the commission insisted that it was “vested with the power to scrutinize whether a proposed elector fulfils the criteria for being registered as a voter,” which included an assessment of citizenship. It added that it could not rely upon EPICs while preparing a new electoral roll, since the cards were prepared on the basis of the existing rolls, and that ration cards had not been included “given the widespread existence of fake ration cards.”
As for Aadhaar, the ECI argued that Section 9 of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act had explicitly stated that enrolment in the scheme does not confer citizenship. “However, this is not to say that Aadhaar cannot be used to supplement other documents to prove eligibility,” it added. “It is for this reason that the list is indicative and not exhaustive.”
In a rejoinder, the ADR described this rationale as “patently absurd.” After all, it argued, Aadhaar cards were being accepted as proof for creating several of the 11 documents on the ECI’s list, including caste and residence certificates, as well as passports. It also punctured the commission’s claim that these 11 documents were widely available, noting that the affidavit’s stated figures of 139 million residence certificates and 87.2 million caste certificates issued between 2011 and 2025, for instance, exceeded the size of the electorate.
The hearing on 28 July lasted only a few minutes, since Surya Kant, who had replaced Dhulia on the bench following the end of the court’s summer vacation, had to attend an administrative meeting with the chief justice. While the bench accepted the ECI’s contention about fake ration cards, Kant again asked the commission to consider EPICs and Aadhaar cards, since there was a “presumption of correctness” with the two documents. “Wherever you find forgery, that’s on case-to-case basis,” he said. “Any document on the earth can be forged.”
Despite the reservations they had expressed during the initial oral arguments, however, Kant and Bagchi refused to grant the petitioners’ request for an injunction halting the publication of the draft electoral roll. Instead, when they reconvened the following day, they scheduled further hearings on 12 and 13 August—nearly two weeks into the next phase of the SIR, when millions of people will already have been excluded from the draft roll and millions of other applications will potentially have been rejected by EROs.
“We are here,” Kant reassured the petitioners. “We will hear you.” Bagchi said that the court would “immediately step in” if there was any evidence of mass exclusion. “Bring fifteen people saying they are alive.” However, their refusal to act did not inspire confidence—the Supreme Court does not have a stellar track record in recent times of effectively checking irregularities in the democratic process.
Three years ago, Kant was part of a vacation bench that inexplicably gave rebel Shiv Sena legislators nearly two weeks of “breathing time” before they had to respond to disqualification notices issued by the deputy speaker of the Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha. During that period, the governor ordered Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray to prove his majority. After the bench refused to issue an injunction halting the floor test, Thackeray resigned. A five-judge constitutional bench ruled, eleven months later, that the governor’s order had lacked any objective basis, but it was too little, too late. As time ticks down for a crucial assembly election in Bihar, fears persist that the court will once again remain a spectator as constitutional authorities play by their own rules.
Sagar is a senior staff writer at The Caravan. He can be reached at sagarjournalist20@gmail.com.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/revising-electoral-rolls-disenfranchise-millions-threaten-citizenship Please consider subscribing to and supporting Caravan.
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