With Bihar SIR sub judice, CEC goes ahead with meeting to plan nationwide rollout

Even as the Bihar SIR project is sub judice in the Supreme Court, a key meeting at the Election Commission headquarters in New Delhi is underway on 10 September, Wednesday, gathering state officials to strategise the now-nationwide launch of the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise.

Senior EC officials are presenting policy details, while Bihar’s chief electoral officer is sharing insights from the recent SIR implementation in the state — a process that began in June, saw 65 lakh voters deleted, and is still being contested by not just Opposition politicians and parties but civil rights activists as well.

This marks the third chief electoral officers' meeting since Gyanesh Kumar was appointed as chief election commissioner; however, today’s session looks vital, as the blueprint for a pan-India SIR is supposedly taking shape. The Commission has confirmed that, following the Bihar’s exercise, the SIR exercise to update electoral rolls will soon cover the entire country.

The EC is expected to roll out the programme in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal later this year itself, to prepare ahead of the 2026 legislative elections. The primary goal, purportedly, is identifying and removing illegal foreign migrants — ostensibly those from Bangladesh and Myanmar primarily, Muslims of course — by rigorously confirming birthplace and identity. The Bihar revised draft rolls, after all the fuss, threw up no foreigners whatsoever that we have been informed of by the ECI — which, we assume, would love to make a song and dance of its success if any had been located.

Notably, as to identification and citizenship, it was only yesterday — after the Supreme Court urged it for a third time on 8 September, Monday — that the ECI has accepted that the Aadhaar card may be taken as the 12th valid document for proof of identity.

But of course, the date for the final publication of Bihar electoral rolls has come and gone. There is no deadline stated for further revisions affecting any of those affected 65 lakh people.

Meanwhile, amid allegations of dual voter IDs to the benefit of the BJP–NDA in particular and a nationwide INDIA bloc campaign against Vote Chori, citing data from the ECI’s own rolls and website, the poll authority is determined to implement SIR nationwide “for the discharge of its constitutional mandate to protect the integrity of the electoral rolls”.

This revision exercise requires officers of the Election Commission to conduct door-to-door verifications for an error-free voter list, with eligible citizens whose names were listed in previous intensive revisions needing to submit updated enumeration forms; others must provide proof of age and citizenship alone — with critics flaying the poll regulatory body for originally selecting a set of documents many don’t have.

As for the efficiency of the door-to-door verifications, the Bihar SIR is the sample we have before us — and being sub judice, we gather it cannot yet be judged.

The recent controversies around the ECI beyond the SIR, meanwhile, have seen the opposition parties alleging mass manipulation of voter data to favour the ruling BJP and its allies.

In response, new safeguards in the SIR include an additional 'declaration form' for those registering as voters for the first time or shifting from outside the state, requiring proof of birth in India before 1 July 1987 and documentation of parental birthplace for others. It remains unclear how this relates to continuance of dual voter IDs or a pattern of shifting voters.

Nor does it explain how the ECI missed Bihar’s dead or ‘permanently shifted’ electorate in the last revision as recently as January 2025. Nor does it address a curious failure to add many new names... when patterns in Maharashtra last year were so much in the opposite trend, with a mysterious voter surge creating a tally exceeding the supposed total population of the state.

The Supreme Court has instructed the EC to ensure no eligible citizen is excluded from the rolls. Some state officers are publishing voter lists from prior SIRs as reference points; for instance, Delhi’s CEO website hosts the 2008 roll and Uttarakhand’s dates to 2006. Bihar’s last such list was from 2003 — matching most states, really, with the majority of such revisions to electoral rolls dating between 2002 and 2004.

Ultimately, the question is whether the ECI can regain the public’s trust in the integrity of the election process with accurate voter rolls — not just ‘updated’ and susceptible to revisions in the lakhs.