SC may ask who decided to conduct the SIR in Bihar, when and why? The answer

• ECI had claimed that SIR was designed to weed out foreigners and infiltrators 

• Home minister Amit Shah has claimed that SIR has identified three crore infiltrators but the ECI is silent 

• In six states, CEOs have informed flagging 1,640 foreigners, 750 of them from Nepal in Karnataka alone

Who took the decision in June 2025 to conduct a special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls? While the Election Commission of India announced the exercise without prior warning on 24 June 2025 and launched it in Bihar at just 24 hours' notice, beginning the very next day, the question remains unanswered. Who decided to conduct the SIR, and why?

Not even the 250-page counter-affidavit filed by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the Supreme Court in response to petitions challenging the exercise provides an answer. While the first 25 pages of the affidavit are said to deal with constitutional provisions, the Election Commission's mandate and the authority it wields, the remaining 225 pages reportedly comprise copies of supporting documents annexed to it. Yet the all-important file noting ordering the SIR, bearing the signatures of all three election commissioners, is reportedly missing.

The question was raised, it is worth recalling, by transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj in an RTI application. The ECI's response was that the decision had not been taken by the Commission and, therefore, there were no files or minutes of meetings to share. Media reports did claim that the ECI had commissioned a survey which found a large number of 'foreign' nationals on Bihar's electoral rolls.

The Commission, however, has not shared the survey report with anyone. It is not in the public domain, and details of the survey, its methodology and the agency that conducted it remain unknown.

The question of who ordered the SIR has assumed renewed significance because the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments later this month and consider the contents of the affidavits and the counter-affidavit submitted by the ECI.

Petitioners are hoping that the Supreme Court will unravel the mystery and direct the ECI to produce the minutes of deliberations, a copy of the alleged survey report and the official file noting bearing the signatures of all three election commissioners. Failure to do so, they argue, would strengthen the suspicion that the decision to conduct the SIR was taken by people outside the ECI and that it was arbitrary and motivated.

The suspicion stems partly from the timing of the exercise. The Bihar Assembly election was due in November 2025. Ordering an SIR in June made little sense barely four months before the election. Equally questionable was the haste with which the exercise was completed, in roughly two months.

The summary revision of Bihar's electoral rolls had already been carried out in January 2024, ahead of the Lok Sabha election, and again in January 2025 as part of the routine exercise. Against this backdrop, the decision to conduct a hurried SIR in June did not appear warranted.

If the ECI was indeed concerned about infiltrators and foreign nationals on the electoral rolls, the SIR in Bihar provided little clarity. The enumeration forms used for the exercise do not have any specific column for identifying infiltrators or foreign nationals. In cases where citizenship is in doubt, the ECI is expected under the law to refer them to the ministry of home affairs. However, the Commission has not officially disclosed how many infiltrators, if any, were identified in Bihar.

Meanwhile, RTI responses from chief electoral officers (CEOs) in six states, according to media reports, claim that 1,640 foreign nationals were found on the electoral rolls of Karnataka, Jharkhand, Kerala, Meghalaya, Goa and Mizoram.

As many as 716 were reportedly identified in Karnataka, of whom 550 were said to be from Nepal. In Jharkhand, where the BJP had mounted a high-decibel campaign against infiltration, only three foreign nationals were reportedly flagged, all from Afghanistan. The two foreign nationals found on the electoral rolls in Meghalaya were also said to be from Nepal.

Significantly, the corresponding figure for Bihar remains unavailable. Yet Union home minister Amit Shah has claimed that the SIR exercise detected three crore (30 million) infiltrators.

The two questions the Supreme Court may therefore want the ECI to answer are: (a) Who decided to conduct the SIR, when and why? And (b) how many foreign nationals were detected through the exercise, where and on what basis?