The petitioners in the SIR case have questioned the absolute discretion employed by the Election Commission to conduct the revision of the electoral roll

The Supreme Court on Friday (November 7, 2025) urgently listed on November 11 detailed arguments addressing the very legality of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise that was kicked off before the ongoing Bihar Assembly elections on June 24, and then expanded, in a second phase, by the Election Commission of India to cover 51 crore voters in 12 States and Union Territories, including Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Puducherry.

A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi fixed the case for 11.15 a.m. on Tuesday after advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi made an oral mentioning. The SIR case had been listed earlier on November 4, but the two judges could not take it up as they were part of a Constitution Bench hearing another case on that day.

Simultaneously, a separate mentioning was made in the morning before a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai by advocate Vivek Singh appearing for Tamil Nadu’s ruling party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, which has also challenged the SIR's constitutionality. The Chief Justice told Mr. Singh that the case would be listed for hearing on November 11. It is highly likely that the DMK petition, which is a fresh one, would also come up before Justice Kant’s Bench, along with the other pending petitions in the case.

DMK terms SIR a de facto NRC

The DMK, also represented by senior advocates NR Elango and Amit Anand Tiwari, has termed SIR to be a thinly-disguised, de facto National Register of Citizens (NRC) set to disenfranchise lakhs of voters and disrupt free and fair elections and democracy in the country, which are part of the basic structure of the Constitution.

In his mentioning before Justice Kant’s Bench, Mr. Bhushan said the hearing in the challenge to the SIR cannot wait any longer as “SIR has started and resumed with some urgency across the country”. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for a Member of Parliament from West Bengal, too had joined Mr. Bhushan to seek an urgent hearing.

‘’They are not accepting Aadhaar despite the order of this court. They said they would accept, but they are not. They are only accepting other documents,” Mr. Bhushan submitted.

He said the case was “very, very urgent as it goes to the roots of our democracy”. Mr. Bhushan said the SIR case ought to be taken up and heard even before the petition challenging the Centre’s dominant role in the appointments of the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners under the Chief Election Commissioner and other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service, and Term of Office) Act of 2023, also listed for hearing on November 11. Mr. Bhushan’s client, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), is the common petitioner in both the SIR and CEC appointments law cases.

The petitioners in the SIR case have questioned the absolute discretion employed by the Election Commission to conduct the revision of the electoral roll.

The Supreme Court, in a July 10 order, had highlighted basic questions posed by the petitioners challenging the Bihar SIR. These primarily included whether the EC has the “very powers to undertake the exercise”. Secondly, the court had flagged the petitioners’ objection to the “procedure and the manner in which the SIR exercise is being undertaken”.

The court had recorded the argument of petitioners that the SIR exercise, notified on June 24, under Section 21(3) of the Representation of People Act, 1950, was not only violative of fundamental rights of the voters, but also breach the Representation of People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. The petitioners had argued that SIR was only an excuse to conduct “citizenship screening”.

However, past hearings in the SIR case had veered away from examining the constitutionality of the exercise to ensuring that voters were not arbitrarily excluded from the electoral roll in Bihar.

Infusing transparency

Though the court had not stayed the Bihar SIR exercise, it had made several timely interventions to infuse more transparency into the process, order the inclusion of Aadhaar as a 12th document and to ensure publication of the draft electoral roll, among other measures.

An October 9 hearing gave the first indication that the court, over the course of time, had more or less accepted that a pan-India SIR was inevitable. Addressing EC counsel and senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, Justice Kant had orally observed that “you [EC] have decided to carry out SIR on a pan-India basis, So, this experience [with Bihar] would have made you wiser now… The next time you introduce a SIR module, owing to what you experienced now, you would also bring some improvements.”

The EC has asserted that it had plenary power under Article 324 to conduct SIR..

A cardinal point raised by petitioners was whether citizenship would come under the purview of the EC when specific statutes like the Citizenship Act and the Foreigners Act address the issue of acquisition of Indian citizenship and illegal aliens, respectively.

The EC had contended that one of the fundamental pre-conditions set out in Article 326 (adult suffrage) was that a person was required to be an Indian citizen to be registered in the electoral roll.