he recent judgment of the Supreme Court justifying the validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the case of Bihar and giving a clean chit to it appear to be deeply flawed.  The controversy has been mostly restricted to debates about the resulting disenfranchisement of lakhs or crores of citizens and the manner of updating the electoral rolls. There has been less debate about the manner in which the SC has ignored the arguments presented by the Petitioners with regard to the judgements of the SC Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner (1978) and the A.C. Jose v. Sivan Pillai (1984) judgments.   The judgments had held that “where there is an Act and express Rules made thereunder, it is not open to the Commission (ECI) to override the Act or the Rules”.  

The reasoning given by the ECI for the SIR is that over the past two decades, substantial changes in the electoral rolls have occurred on account of rapid urbanisation and largescale migration which need to be corrected.  The second purpose of the SIR was to ensure that only eligible citizens are enrolled, for which enumeration forms mapped with 2003 rolls and one of 11 documents were to be produced.  These measures of the SIR were justified by the SC as a valid means for fulfilling both purposes. 

But why were these changes to the electoral roll not continuously updated as and when they occurred, as in several other countries, so that there would not be these lakhs of errors in them, and there would be no scope for sudden deletions or additions of lakhs of names as has happened during the SIR?   Why, 75 years after the country became a republic, 94+ crores of citizens still do not possess a citizenship identity card to prove their citizenship, as in other countries, and are being made to run from pillar to post through the SIR?

The Petitioners referred to the two judgments cited above mostly with reference to the provisions of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) and the Registration of Electors Rules (RER).  However, with the ECI linking the issue of citizenship to the SIR, it is questionable why no cognisance has been taken by the SC of the existence of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) of 2003, “The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003” thereunder, and the Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, which have clear requirements regarding the cleansing of electoral rolls and providing evidence of citizenship. 

The fault appears to lie in the fact that these laws and rules on citizenship and electoral rolls linked to them, though discriminatory in the criteria adopted for determining citizenship, had some salubrious points similar to provisions in other countries,  which if implemented, would have cleansed the electoral rolls and given a citizenship ID to all those eligible, so that the current mess in the electoral rolls and the inability of citizens to prove their citizenship would not have existed.

The CAA 2003, which inserted a new section 14A into the principal Citizenship Act of 1955, and the Rules thereunder, were for the creation of a National Register of Citizens (NRC) through fresh door-to-door enumeration, a continuously updated local database of all citizens residing in an area, linked to the birth and death registers, and the issue of citizenship ID cards to each of the citizens.  In addition, the Union Home Ministry, under its Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, intended to digitize and centralize birth and death records, which were to be further linked to the preparation or maintenance of electoral rolls, among others. 

Hence an organic link between the Citizenship Act and Rules and the preparation of electoral rolls was created.  But the existence of these salutary provisions in the CAA 2003 and its rules have not been taken note of by the SC at all in its judgement on the SIR. 

​If these provisions had been implemented in 2003-04 itself when the Special Revision of electoral rolls was done, all those who were included in the electoral rolls in that year, and those added later to the electoral rolls, would have received citizenship ID cards then itself as the judgment in the Lal Babu Hussein & Others vs Electoral Registration Officer & Others of 1995 would have protected them.  The Lal Babu Hussein judgement stated that when a person’s name is already in the electoral rolls, there is a presumption of citizenship, and if that is to be questioned, the onus is on the ECI to provide the evidence for the doubt, and not on the citizens.    Implementing the above provisions enabling clean electoral rolls and issue of citizenship ID cards would have made the need for SIR today redundant.

However, over the years, successive governments showed hesitancy or conflicting stands on implementing this law, stalling action. But the implementation was put further on the backburner in the wake of the massive protests by citizens against the preparation of the NRC itself, given the discriminatory provisions for defining citizenship in the CAA 2019, which if implemented would have led to the disenfranchisement of lakhs or crores of citizens.

But much of this vehement opposition was, and is, being misdirected at the creation of the NRC itself and the issue of citizenship ID cards, instead of being aimed only at the discriminatory provisions for defining citizenship which are the roots of the problem.  What was lost sight of was that a Register of Citizens is a mere register, and the register itself is not the avenue for discrimination. That an NRC and citizenship ID cards are a common feature across many countries was lost sight of. According to the UN and demographic statistics sources, 131 countries have mandatory national ID card registrations, which often link to a central population register.

If the healthy manner of having a continuously updated electoral roll at local level had been implemented, it would not have perpetuated the errors which still plague the electoral rolls after 23 years, and still do despite the SIR in Bihar. If all the eligible citizens, as per the Special Revision conducted in 2003, and those added to the electoral rolls later, had been given a Citizenship ID card as mandated, the onus of providing documents to prove their citizenship would not have fallen on them now in 2026.  The consequences of the failure of the government to implement these laws are being faced by citizens across the country now.  But it must not be lost sight of that the SIR is diverting attention from the real need to amend the Citizenship Act to make it non-discriminatory and enabling of universal suffrage.

So, since there is an Act and express Rules thereunder which the ECI cannot override,  the question arises as to why the procedures set out in the CAA 2003 and its Rules, and their link to the Union’s Registration of Births and Deaths (Amendment) Act, 2023, were not cited by the Petitioners and also directed by the SC to be adopted for cleansing the electoral roll and determining the eligibility of a person to be on it, instead of approving the SIR – an extra-legal method as per experts – totally divorced from these procedures.    It needs to be questioned, and legal experts need to pronounce, whether this lapse on the part of the SC in approving the SIR is a violation of the earlier judgments issued by the SC in the Mohinder Singh Gill v. Chief Election Commissioner (1978) and A.C. Jose v. Sivan Pillai (1984) cases which the SC should have, or should examine, to provide relief to 93+ crore citizens now facing the risk of being disenfranchised through the SIR.