How SIR turned the right to vote into a test of documentary survival—and why the Election Commission, Parliament and Supreme Court must answer for the system they have created
By Ramphal Katria
There is a deceptively simple question at the heart of India's current electoral crisis:
Who decides whether an Indian citizen is entitled to vote?
The Constitution gives the Election Commission of India responsibility for the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of elections. Parliament has provided the statutory machinery. Electoral Registration Officers are empowered to prepare and revise constituency rolls. Citizens have rights of inclusion, objection and appeal.
But the Special Intensive Revision has introduced a new reality.
A citizen who has voted for years can suddenly become a doubtful entry.
A family relationship can become a “logical discrepancy”.
A software flag can trigger a notice.
A local Electoral Registration Officer can hear the citizen and find the person eligible—but the software may not permit that decision to be implemented.
And by the time the appeal is finally decided, the election may already be over.
That is not a minor administrative inconvenience.
A vote restored after polling day is a vote restored too late.
The Special Intensive Revision began in Bihar in June 2025. It was subsequently extended across other states and Union Territories. According to the material compiled in the Indian Express investigation, more than 13 crore names had been struck from draft rolls across 30 States and Union Territories. At the same time, two of the three Election Commissioners—Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi—recorded objections at least 14 times in ten months concerning voter registration, deletion, restoration, electoral-roll software and internal decision-making.
The Election Commission says these disagreements were part of normal institutional deliberation and that its decisions were ultimately unanimous.
That explanation does not end the matter.
It makes the unanswered questions more important.
The constitutional starting point: the vote belongs to the citizen
Article 324 of the Constitution vests the “superintendence, direction and control” of electoral rolls and elections in the Election Commission.
Article 325 says there shall be one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency and that no person shall be ineligible for inclusion on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex.
Article 326 establishes elections to the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies on the basis of adult suffrage.
Together, these provisions create a constitutional architecture in which the electoral roll is not an administrative convenience.
It is the gateway through which the citizen exercises representative democracy.
The Representation of the People Act, 1950 supplies the statutory machinery.
Section 21 provides for preparation and revision of electoral rolls and permits the Commission, for reasons to be recorded, to direct a special revision.
Section 22 deals with correction of entries and deletion of names.
Section 23 provides for inclusion of names.
The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 provide the procedural framework for intensive revision, claims, objections and publication.
The important point is that the Election Commission's constitutional authority is enormous—but it is not unbounded.
Article 324 does not mean Article 324 alone.
The Commission must exercise its power within the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act and the Rules framed under it.
That distinction became the centre of the Bihar litigation.
Bihar: the experiment that changed the meaning of a voter
The Bihar SIR was launched only months before the Assembly election.
The Election Commission described it as a revision designed to identify eligible citizens, eliminate deceased or shifted voters, remove duplicate entries and ensure that the roll was accurate.
In principle, nobody can seriously object to cleaning electoral rolls.
Dead people should not vote.
Duplicate entries should be removed.
People who have permanently shifted should not remain registered at two places.
Foreign nationals who are legally ineligible should not be enrolled.
The controversy begins with how the exercise was designed and what happened to citizens already on the roll.
Approximately 65 lakh names were absent from Bihar's draft electoral roll.
The Supreme Court subsequently directed the ECI to publish the names of those excluded and the reasons for exclusion. It also directed that Aadhaar be accepted as an identity document, while clarifying that Aadhaar itself was not proof of citizenship.
Those judicial interventions mattered.
But they did not alter the basic fact that millions of existing electors were initially pushed outside the draft roll and required to establish their entitlement to return.
The final Bihar roll contained approximately 7.42 crore electors, compared with about 7.89 crore before the exercise—a net reduction of roughly 47 lakh after additions and deletions.
The arithmetic deserves attention.
The draft exercise identified roughly 65 lakh people who were not carried forward.
The final exercise subsequently added more than 21 lakh electors.
The question is therefore not simply:
How many names were deleted?
It is:
How many legitimate voters were temporarily or permanently displaced by the process, how many successfully returned, and how many failed because they could not navigate the documentary machinery in time?
The last category is the one democracy cannot easily measure.
A dead voter does not complain.
A migrant may not know about a notice.
A poor citizen may not possess an old document.
An elderly citizen may not understand an online process.
A woman whose name changed after marriage may find the family-linkage requirement impossible to establish.
The State knows how many names it removed.
It may never know how many genuine citizens it silently disenfranchised.
“Ghuspathiya”: the political justification that demands evidence
The most politically powerful justification for the Bihar SIR was the alleged presence of illegal foreign nationals.
The language became sharper during the campaign.
The word “ghuspathiya”—infiltrator—was repeatedly used in political discourse surrounding the revision.
That transformed an electoral-roll exercise into a national-security narrative.
But national-security language cannot substitute for electoral evidence.
The obvious question remains:
How many “ghuspathiyas” were actually identified and removed from the Bihar electoral roll?
And by what process?
How many were foreign nationals?
How many were dead?
How many had shifted?
How many were duplicates?
How many could not be traced?
How many failed to provide documents?
How many were ultimately found eligible?
These categories must be separated.
Otherwise the public is left with a politically convenient word—“infiltrator”—while the electoral consequences fall upon millions of ordinary citizens.
The material before us does not establish that the Election Commission found a huge population of foreign nationals in Bihar corresponding to the political rhetoric surrounding SIR.
That is precisely why a transparent, category-wise state-level disclosure is necessary.
If the “ghuspathiya” argument justified an extraordinary electoral exercise, the evidence supporting that argument should be available for public audit.
Did the Supreme Court act—or merely manage the process?
The Supreme Court is not merely another institution in the electoral chain. It is the guardian of the Constitution—the final constitutional safeguard when the rights of ordinary citizens come into conflict with the power of the State. No government, political party, Election Commission or electoral process can be permitted to turn the Court into an instrument for partisan advantage. Its responsibility is to protect the Constitution and the citizen, irrespective of who benefits politically.
That makes the Court’s handling of SIR particularly uncomfortable.
The Court did intervene. In Bihar, where nearly 65 lakh names were excluded from the draft electoral roll, it demanded disclosure, permitted Aadhaar to be used as an identity document, insisted on procedural safeguards and ultimately upheld the ECI’s authority to conduct the SIR.
But the uncomfortable question remains: was intervention enough when the clock of an election was already running?
A constitutional remedy that arrives after polling cannot restore the vote that a citizen was prevented from casting.
Bihar was the warning.
West Bengal became the test.
During the Bengal SIR, around 60 lakh voters were subjected to adjudication for “logical discrepancies”; 27.16 lakh were subsequently declared ineligible and removed. The Supreme Court itself took cognisance of the problem and placed the adjudication process before judicial officers. Yet the appellate machinery moved painfully slowly. By September, more than 22 lakh of those deleted voters had appealed for reinstatement, while only 1,607 had been restored in time to vote in the Assembly election.
At one stage, the Court was told that of roughly 82,000 appeals already decided, more than 75,000 had resulted in restoration—about 91 per cent. Later reporting put the success rate at about 93 per cent for another batch of roughly 1.2 lakh appeals.
Those figures should provoke a basic constitutional question.
If a substantial proportion of citizens challenging their exclusion were ultimately found entitled to restoration, on what basis were they denied the franchise in the election that had already taken place?
The Court itself recognised the temporal problem. In April, it directed that voters whose appeals were decided in their favour before specified polling deadlines could be added through supplementary rolls. Later, Justice Joymalya Bagchi observed that the Court was concerned about the time taken by the tribunals and that merely filing an appeal was not enough. The Chief Justice said the pending appeals needed time-bound adjudication.
That is precisely the point.
The right to vote is not an instalment payable in the next election.
A citizen who is eligible today cannot be told that the machinery will establish that eligibility tomorrow and that the next election will therefore be available as compensation.
An election conducted on a roll containing wrongful exclusions is not necessarily invalid merely because exclusions occurred; electoral law provides specific mechanisms for challenging election results. Nor is there evidence that SIR determined the outcome of the West Bengal election. Indeed, the available constituency-level data do not establish such causation. But the existence of a lawful election does not answer the separate constitutional question of whether every eligible citizen had a meaningful opportunity to exercise the franchise.
That distinction matters.
The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the Bihar SIR. In Bengal, it created judicial mechanisms, demanded data and continued monitoring the appeals. These were substantial interventions.
But the harder constitutional question remains:
When millions of citizens face exclusion from the electoral roll immediately before an election, is it enough to create a remedy—or must the constitutional guardian ensure that the remedy operates before the vote is cast?
If the answer comes only after polling, the Court may have managed the process without fully protecting the right at the moment when that right mattered most.
And that is where the Court, the Election Commission and the entire constitutional machinery must answer to the ordinary Indian citizen—not to a party, not to a government, and not to an ideology, but to the Constitution itself.
West Bengal: when “logical discrepancy” became a new category of doubt
West Bengal transformed the SIR controversy.
Approximately 60 lakh electors were flagged for “logical discrepancies”.
That expression sounds technical and harmless.
It is neither.
A logical discrepancy was essentially a mismatch produced by the electoral software when attempting to establish relationships with previous electoral records.
A parent's name might differ.
An age relationship might appear inconsistent.
A name might not match the historical record.
A voter might not possess the document required to satisfy the database.
But a software mismatch is not the same thing as proof that a person is ineligible.
A computer can identify an inconsistency. It cannot, by itself, determine citizenship.
That determination requires human scrutiny under law.
The Supreme Court recognised this distinction by requiring affected electors to be given an opportunity to produce documents and be heard.
Judicial officers were brought into the process.
Approximately 27 lakh electors were ultimately deleted.
And then came the extraordinary spectacle:
the election approached while the appeals remained unresolved.
The Commission later informed the Supreme Court that approximately 38 lakh appeals were pending before tribunals, including about 22.21 lakh appeals by deleted voters seeking restoration.
Another 16.10 lakh appeals were against voters whom judicial officers had included.
And this produced another question raised internally by Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu:
Who authorised those appeals?
Who filed them?
On whose instructions?
Why had the other Election Commissioners and even the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer not been informed of the basis or process?
Those are not political slogans.
They are administrative questions arising from the Election Commission's own records.
The most disturbing sentence in the Bengal episode
The West Bengal litigation produced a moment that should trouble anyone who takes the franchise seriously.
More than 27 lakh voters had been excluded.
The electoral process continued.
The appeals continued.
And the practical effect was that citizens whose eligibility was still under adjudication could not exercise their franchise.
When the question of their vote arose, the response effectively became:
they can vote in the next election.
That proposition may make administrative sense.
It makes little democratic sense.
There is no constitutional principle saying:
You cannot vote today, but if your legal status is established later, you may vote five years from now.
Elections are not academic examinations.
The opportunity is perishable.
If a citizen is wrongly excluded on polling day, the injury is immediate and irreversible for that election.
The later restoration of the name cannot reproduce the lost vote.
That is why the Supreme Court's handling of the West Bengal SIR deserves much deeper constitutional scrutiny.
The Court created judicial mechanisms.
But mechanisms that cannot conclude before polling day can become procedural substitutes for substantive justice.
The 93 per cent question
The subsequent tribunal process created an even more disturbing statistic.
The Election Commission later informed the Supreme Court that roughly 93 per cent of a later batch of about 1.2 lakh affected voters who appealed had succeeded, leaving only 8,649 excluded.
This does not prove that 93 per cent of all 27 lakh deleted voters were wrongly removed.
That conclusion would go beyond the evidence.
But it establishes something important:
a very large proportion of disputed exclusions were capable of being reversed when citizens received an effective opportunity to establish their eligibility.
That raises a fundamental question.
Why was the burden not structured to protect their franchise before polling?
Why should a citizen prove his right after losing it rather than the State establish the lawful basis for exclusion before the citizen is deprived of voting?
That is the philosophical inversion at the heart of SIR.
Goa: the software that defeated the Electoral Registration Officer
Then came Goa.
This is where the controversy moved from statistics to something concrete.
The Supreme Court had directed that electors flagged for logical discrepancies should receive notice, produce documents and be heard.
Goa's Electoral Registration Officers conducted those hearings.
They examined documents.
They found 97 voters eligible.
The local statutory officers therefore decided that those citizens should be included.
But the software did not provide a mechanism for them to reverse the earlier deletion.
The Goa Chief Electoral Officer's office wrote to Delhi eight times in seven days seeking a rollback facility.
The request remained unanswered.
The deadline arrived.
The final roll was published.
The 97 names were absent.
And the Commission's own Deputy Election Commissioner reportedly wrote to the Director General of IT:
“IT system cannot block necessary action as per the directions of SC.”
That sentence should be framed on the wall of every election office in India.
Because it exposes the central problem.
The statutory officer had decided.
The software prevented implementation.
At that point the issue ceased to be merely about SIR.
It became a constitutional question about who exercises electoral power:
the officer authorised by law—or the administrator controlling the software?
The Indian Express investigation reports that all 97 remained missing from the roll even months later.
That is why the objections of Sandhu and Joshi about ECINET centralisation cannot be dismissed as bureaucratic disagreement.
They now have a real-world case study.
ECINET: when decentralisation became centralisation
The Election Commission's long-standing defence against allegations of manipulation has been decentralisation.
An Electoral Registration Officer prepares the electoral roll of a constituency.
The ERO hears claims.
The ERO hears objections.
The ERO decides.
This architecture distributes electoral power.
But the digital system can redistribute that power again.
According to the Indian Express investigation, Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi warned in May 2026 about the “gradual centralisation” of the electoral-roll database.
He proposed an audit to ensure that no one except the statutory authorities had credentials capable of changing voter data.
In August, Sandhu recorded that state officials did not have “proper and complete access” to ERONet and questioned the legal authority of the IT division to restrict statutory officials.
That is an extraordinary institutional warning.
The Constitution does not create an IT Commissioner.
The Representation of the People Act does not create a software administrator with superior electoral authority.
The law gives power to statutory officers.
Technology is supposed to implement that power.
It cannot quietly become the source of that power.
The Form 6 controversy
Then came Form 6.
Form 6 is the ordinary gateway through which a new elector applies for inclusion in the electoral roll.
In July 2026, applicants found a new question connecting their application with the previous SIR electoral roll and asking whether the applicant or their parents/grandparents existed on that historical roll.
The problem was not merely the question.
It was the legal authority for inserting it.
Election Commissioner Vivek Joshi had recorded in May that Form 6 could not be altered in this manner without amending the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.
Sandhu agreed.
The alteration nevertheless appeared.
After the issue became public, Sandhu described it as “unauthorised and illegal” and demanded its removal.
The question reportedly remained on the form even afterwards.
This is precisely the kind of event that destroys institutional confidence.
Not because disagreement occurred.
Disagreement is normal.
But because the public is entitled to know:
Who authorised the change?
Under what statutory provision?
Why was it implemented despite the written objections of two Election Commissioners?
The ECI's later statement that its decisions were unanimous does not answer those specific questions.
Fourteen objections: what did the two Commissioners actually challenge?
The Indian Express investigation reported at least 14 formal objections by Sandhu and Joshi during ten months.
The objections are significant because they were not about trivial administrative details.
They touched the core of electoral power.
1. Changing Form 6
Joshi objected that the statutory form could not be changed without amending the applicable rules.
2. Sandhu's concurrence
Sandhu agreed with Joshi's objection.
3. The Form 6 change nevertheless appeared
The SIR-linked declaration appeared on the online application.
4. Sandhu called the change “unauthorised and illegal”
He subsequently demanded immediate removal.
5. Centralisation of the electoral database
Joshi warned about the “gradual centralisation” of voter data.
6. Audit of database credentials
He sought confirmation that only legally authorised officials could modify voter records.
7. Restricted ERO access
Sandhu recorded that field-level election officials lacked complete access to ERONet.
8. Legal authority of the IT division
Sandhu questioned whether the Director General of IT had legal authority to restrict the statutory powers of EROs, DEOs and CEOs.
9. West Bengal appeals
Sandhu questioned the authority behind appeals filed against voters whose inclusion had been directed by judicial officers.
10. Who filed those appeals?
He specifically asked who had actually filed them.
11. Lack of information to Commissioners
Sandhu recorded that neither he nor Joshi had been informed about the basis or process.
12. Communications issued without Commission approval
Sandhu objected to communications being issued in the ECI's name without approval of the Commission.
13. Joshi raised the same institutional concern
Joshi separately warned that communications were being disseminated without the requisite approval.
14. IT/ICT work allocation
Both Commissioners objected to a change in work allocation affecting IT/ICT without their knowledge, took the matter to the Cabinet Secretary and subsequently set aside the allocation.
These are not proof of criminal misconduct.
They are not proof that every disputed decision was unlawful.
But they are evidence of something undeniable:
There was a serious internal institutional disagreement about how electoral power was being exercised.
The ECI's response was that such differences are normal and that all decisions were ultimately unanimous.
That is a legitimate institutional position.
But it creates an obvious demand for transparency:
Show the public how the disagreements were resolved.
Section 18: the CEC is not a constitutional monarch
The governing statute is the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners (Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office) Act, 2023.
Section 18 says that the business of the Commission shall, as far as possible, be transacted unanimously.
Where the Commissioners differ, the matter is decided according to the majority.
This is critical.
The Chief Election Commissioner is the head of the Commission.
But he is not legally the sole Election Commission.
The Supreme Court's earlier jurisprudence had already established the principle that the CEC is first among equals in a multi-member Commission.
Therefore, when two Commissioners repeatedly say they were not consulted, were not informed, or disagreed with actions attributed to the Commission, the public is entitled to ask whether institutional decision-making was functioning as Parliament intended.
This is not about personalities.
It is about the structure of constitutional power.
How the Election Commission is selected: the constitutional reversal
The story becomes even more consequential when one looks at who appoints the people exercising this power.
In Anoop Baranwal v Union of India (2023), a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court held that, until Parliament enacted legislation, appointments to the Election Commission should be made on the recommendation of a committee comprising:
the Prime Minister;
the Leader of Opposition; and
the Chief Justice of India.
The Court's concern was institutional independence.
Parliament subsequently enacted the 2023 law.
The new statutory Selection Committee replaced the Chief Justice of India with a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister.
The committee therefore consists of:
the Prime Minister;
the Leader of Opposition; and
a Union Cabinet Minister nominated by the Prime Minister.
This changes the arithmetic.
Under the Supreme Court's interim arrangement, the government had two members and the judiciary one.
Under the enacted law, the government side has two members and the Opposition one.
The difference is not that the Prime Minister automatically controls the appointment.
The Leader of Opposition remains a member.
But the Chief Justice of India—the institutional actor outside the executive and legislature—has been removed from the selection process.
That deserves constitutional scrutiny because the Election Commission is the referee of the very political contest from which the government derives its power.
The referee's independence cannot depend merely upon the personal integrity of whoever happens to occupy the chair.
It has to be embedded in the architecture of appointment.
Section 16: protection or insulation?
The 2023 law contains another provision that deserves public attention.
Section 16 provides protection against civil or criminal proceedings concerning acts, things or words done or spoken by a CEC or Election Commissioner while acting, or purporting to act, in the discharge of official duty or function.
The language extends to a person who “is or was” a CEC or Election Commissioner.
That means the protection is not simply about the period in office.
It potentially extends beyond tenure.
Supporters may argue that such protection is necessary to prevent frivolous litigation and preserve institutional independence.
Critics argue that excessive immunity can weaken accountability.
Both propositions can coexist.
An election referee needs independence.
But an election referee also exercises power over millions of citizens.
The constitutional question is therefore not:
Should Election Commissioners be independent?
Of course.
It is:
What mechanism remains when independence becomes abuse?
That is why transparency, parliamentary scrutiny, judicial review and institutional records matter.
An institution protected from ordinary litigation cannot simultaneously become protected from public accountability.
Was the SIR a deliberate operation of the Central Government?
This is where evidence must be separated from allegation.
Opposition leaders have repeatedly alleged that SIR was politically designed to remove voters likely to oppose the ruling establishment.
Rahul Gandhi has described electoral-roll manipulation as “vote chori”.
Congress leaders have alleged coordination between the Prime Minister, Home Minister and Election Commission.
Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, MK Stalin and other Opposition leaders have made similar allegations in stronger terms.
The BJP rejects these claims.
The Election Commission rejects the suggestion that it is operating under dictatorial control and says differences among Commissioners are normal institutional deliberation.
There is presently no established public finding proving that Narendra Modi personally ordered the deletion of particular categories of voters.
That distinction matters.
But there is another distinction that matters equally:
The absence of proof of a conspiracy does not eliminate the need to investigate institutional vulnerability.
The relevant evidence is already enough to demand answers.
Two Commissioners say they were repeatedly excluded from decisions.
A statutory form was changed despite written objections.
Electoral-roll software was increasingly centralised.
ERO decisions in Goa could not be implemented.
Questions arose over the authority behind West Bengal appeals.
The Commission itself acknowledges the existence of the internal notes.
And the ECI has not publicly answered each substantive question raised in those notes.
That is enough for an independent institutional audit.
No conspiracy theory is necessary.
Rahul Gandhi's allegations: from Maharashtra to Karnataka and Haryana
The controversy did not begin with the latest SIR disclosures.
Rahul Gandhi had been raising electoral-roll concerns for months.
In Karnataka's Aland Assembly constituency, he alleged that thousands of deletion applications were submitted in an organised manner.
The Election Commission disputed his interpretation, while acknowledging that unsuccessful deletion attempts had occurred and that an FIR had been registered.
Then came Haryana.
At a press conference, Gandhi presented what he called the “H-Files”, alleging more than 25 lakh instances of voter irregularity in the 2024 Haryana Assembly election.
He referred to duplicate voters, invalid addresses, bulk voters, misuse of Forms 6 and 7 and questionable photographs.
He highlighted the Rai Assembly constituency and a photograph of Brazilian model allegedly appearing against multiple voter entries.
These were serious allegations.
They were also allegations.
The appropriate institutional response to allegations of this scale should have been forensic transparency:
voter-level data;
application trails;
IP logs;
OTP records;
Form 6 and Form 7 histories;
Booth Level Officer reports;
ERO orders;
deletion applications;
restoration records.
Instead, the political debate became a contest of accusation and denial.
That is precisely what an independent Election Commission should prevent.
It should replace political suspicion with verifiable evidence.
From addition to deletion: the dangerous transformation
For decades, the central political concern surrounding electoral rolls was often bogus addition.
The fear was that somebody would add thousands of fictitious voters.
SIR changes the direction of the anxiety.
Now the most consequential administrative power may be the power to delete.
Addition can affect an election.
Deletion can prevent a citizen from participating in one.
That makes deletion the more dangerous administrative weapon if adequate safeguards do not exist.
A fictitious voter has no constitutional claim.
A genuine citizen does.
The State therefore has a heavier responsibility before deleting a living citizen's name than before refusing a new application.
The system should be built around a presumption of inclusion subject to lawful verification—not around an administrative presumption that citizens must repeatedly prove themselves.
Delhi: the national experiment arrives in the capital
Delhi is where the consequences have become impossible to ignore.
The draft electoral roll reportedly dropped approximately 47.7 lakh names from the earlier roll, leaving roughly 97.5 lakh electors out of approximately 1.45 crore.
More than 33 lakh voters received notices relating to discrepancies.
That is not a marginal administrative exercise.
It is a transformation of the capital's electorate.
And the problem is not confined to ordinary citizens.
The SIR machinery has itself generated notices involving prominent individuals, including Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu.
The irony is impossible to miss.
If the system can flag a serving Election Commissioner, then the system's criteria deserve examination.
A database is not infallible because it is digital.
A computer can produce a precise error.
Indeed, the more precise the computer appears, the more dangerous an incorrect classification can become because bureaucrats may trust it more than the citizen standing before them.
The 13-crore question
The material compiled in the investigation states that more than 13 crore names had been struck from draft electoral rolls across 30 States and Union Territories.
That figure should not be casually described as 13 crore wrongly deleted voters.
A draft-roll deletion is not necessarily a final deletion.
Some names are dead.
Some people have migrated.
Some may be duplicates.
Some may be ineligible.
Some may be restored.
The distinction between draft exclusion and final deletion is essential.
But the sheer scale makes one thing unavoidable:
India needs a national SIR database showing, state by state:
Category | Number |
Names on pre-SIR roll | To be disclosed state-wise |
Draft exclusions | To be disclosed |
Deaths verified | To be disclosed |
Permanent migration verified | To be disclosed |
Duplicate entries verified | To be disclosed |
Citizenship-related exclusions | To be disclosed |
Logical discrepancies | To be disclosed |
Notices issued | To be disclosed |
Claims filed | To be disclosed |
Names restored | To be disclosed |
Final deletions | To be disclosed |
Appeals pending | To be disclosed |
Appeals allowed | To be disclosed |
Appeals rejected | To be disclosed |
Without this table, the public is being asked to trust an institution whose very function is to produce trustworthy electoral data.
The international question
India's democratic reputation does not depend upon foreign approval.
But international assessments matter because they provide an external measurement of institutional confidence.
Freedom House's 2026 assessment recorded concerns around electoral administration, institutional independence and the SIR controversy while also recording the Indian government's rejection of such criticisms.
The Guardian and other international publications have reported on the consequences of documentation-driven electoral exclusions, including their effect on vulnerable groups.
Such reporting does not prove that India's elections are fraudulent.
Nor does international criticism automatically establish domestic wrongdoing.
But it should make the government and Election Commission more—not less—interested in transparency.
A democracy confident in its electoral system should welcome verification.
The easiest way to defeat allegations of electoral manipulation is not to arrest the allegation.
It is to publish the data.
The Supreme Court cannot become the waiting room of democracy
The judiciary faces a difficult institutional problem.
If it intervenes too aggressively, it may be accused of entering the Election Commission's administrative domain.
If it intervenes too little, millions of citizens may lose their effective opportunity to vote.
But there is a fundamental principle the judiciary should not lose sight of:
Electoral rights are time-sensitive rights.
A judicial remedy that arrives after polling day may be formally meaningful but practically incomplete.
This is especially important in a system where the number of disputed voters can exceed victory margins.
The Indian Express material notes that in 49 West Bengal constituencies, SIR deletions exceeded the eventual victory margin.
That does not prove that SIR changed the result in those constituencies.
Indeed, the distribution of victories was almost evenly divided between BJP and TMC among those seats.
But it demonstrates why the integrity of the electoral roll is inseparable from the integrity of the result.
If the margin is 20,000 and 50,000 eligible voters are excluded, the question cannot simply be postponed.
The constitutional injury may already have occurred.
The election cannot be a laboratory
There is a disturbing pattern in the chronology.
Bihar:
SIR → exclusions → litigation → judicial safeguards → election.
West Bengal:
SIR → logical discrepancies → judicial intervention → deletions → appeals → election → unresolved voters.
Delhi:
SIR → tens of lakhs flagged → notices → litigation → process still underway.
Meanwhile, the national exercise continues.
The citizen is effectively participating in a giant administrative experiment whose consequences are being discovered while elections continue.
That is backwards.
The rules of the electoral game should be settled before the game.
The identity of the electorate should be established before polling.
The appeal mechanism should be capable of delivering relief before the ballot is cast.
The software should implement the ERO's lawful decision immediately.
And the Election Commission itself should function transparently as a three-member constitutional body.
“Electoral Monarchy”
This is why the phrase “electoral monarchy” has entered the public vocabulary.
It should not be understood literally.
India is still a constitutional democracy.
Elections are still contested.
Governments are still elected.
Courts still exercise judicial review.
Opposition parties still campaign.
Citizens still vote.
But institutions can remain formally democratic while becoming increasingly centralised in practice.
That is the danger.
When:
appointments become more executive-dependent;
immunity becomes broader;
voter databases become centralised;
local officers lose technological control;
statutory forms change without transparent explanation;
two Commissioners repeatedly complain about being excluded;
millions of voters are placed in uncertainty;
remedies arrive after elections;
and the institution refuses to publish the complete decision trail,
the problem is no longer merely about one SIR.
It is about the architecture of electoral power.
What must happen now
There is a straightforward way out.
The Election Commission should publish every substantive document relating to the SIR process.
Not selectively.
Not through press releases.
The public should receive:
First: all 14 recorded objections of Sandhu and Joshi and the Commission's written responses to each.
Second: the complete approval trail for the Form 6 modification.
Third: the legal authority under which the Form 6 change was introduced.
Fourth: the complete authorisation trail for the West Bengal appeals.
Fifth: the ECINET/ERONet access-control architecture, including which level of officer can add, delete and restore a voter.
Sixth: the Goa correspondence concerning the 97 voters.
Seventh: state-wise data on every category of SIR exclusion.
Eighth: the number of persons actually identified as foreign nationals through the SIR process, state by state.
Ninth: the number of deleted voters subsequently restored.
Tenth: the number of appeals pending before each tribunal.
Eleventh: the number of appeals allowed and rejected.
Twelfth: the number of citizens whose eligibility was established only after polling.
That would settle much of the controversy.
If the process is clean, transparency will strengthen the Commission.
If there were mistakes, transparency will identify them.
If there was deliberate manipulation, transparency will expose it.
There is no legitimate reason to fear the truth.
Parliament must examine the appointment system
Parliament should also revisit the architecture created by the 2023 law.
The question is not whether the Prime Minister should have any role.
He must.
The question is whether a constitutional referee should be appointed through a mechanism in which the executive effectively holds two seats on a three-member selection committee.
The removal of the Chief Justice of India from the selection process after the Supreme Court's Anoop Baranwal judgment deserves a constitutional debate.
The issue is structural, not personal.
No democracy should design its electoral referee around the assumption that the people currently holding power will always behave perfectly.
Constitutional design exists precisely because power changes hands.
Today's ruling party becomes tomorrow's opposition.
Today's Election Commissioner may be tomorrow's retired officeholder.
Today's electoral system will eventually be used by political opponents.
The system must therefore be strong enough to protect everyone—including the party currently in government—from the temptation to misuse institutional power.
And Section 16 must be debated
Election Commissioners should not be paralysed by fear of endless litigation.
But immunity cannot become impunity.
Section 16 deserves parliamentary and constitutional examination.
If official acts are protected, there must be robust institutional mechanisms for investigating alleged misconduct.
If an Election Commissioner can exercise extraordinary power over the franchise and then receive statutory protection from civil or criminal proceedings concerning official acts, the accountability mechanism must be correspondingly strong.
Independence without accountability is dangerous.
Accountability without independence is equally dangerous.
The constitutional objective must be both.
The real victim is not the Opposition
This is perhaps the most important point.
The debate is too often framed as:
BJP versus Opposition.
That is the wrong frame.
The real issue is:
State versus citizen.
A BJP voter whose name is wrongly deleted is injured.
A Congress voter whose name is wrongly deleted is injured.
A TMC voter is injured.
A Left voter is injured.
An AAP voter is injured.
A person who never votes for any party is injured.
The Election Commission's constitutional duty is not to protect the electoral prospects of the Opposition.
It is not to protect the government.
It is not to protect the Prime Minister.
It is not even to protect itself.
Its duty is to protect the electoral franchise.
The ballot belongs to the citizen.
The final question
India has spent decades building an electoral system admired around the world for its scale.
Hundreds of millions vote.
Thousands of constituencies are managed.
Millions of election personnel work simultaneously.
Political power changes hands through ballots.
That achievement should not be taken for granted.
The greatest threat to such a system is not necessarily a stolen EVM or a fabricated voter.
It can be something much quieter.
A name removed.
A notice unanswered.
A document rejected.
A software permission withheld.
An appeal delayed.
An election completed.
And a citizen told:
“You may vote next time.”
There may be no dramatic moment.
No ballot box needs to disappear.
No polling booth needs to be captured.
The citizen simply arrives at the moment when democracy asks for his vote—and discovers that the State has already decided that he does not exist electorally.
That is why SIR deserves scrutiny far beyond the usual partisan arguments.
The question is not whether India should maintain clean electoral rolls.
It must.
The question is whether the process of cleaning them can itself become a mechanism for exclusion.
The Election Commission says its decisions have been unanimous.
Then publish the record.
It says the system is decentralised.
Then show why an ERO in Goa could not restore 97 voters whom the ERO itself found eligible.
It says SIR protects genuine voters.
Then publish the state-wise number of citizens restored after exclusion.
It says the “ghuspathiya” threat justified the exercise.
Then publish the number of foreign nationals actually identified.
It says the internal disagreements were normal.
Then publish how each of the 14 objections was resolved.
It says the electoral database is secure.
Then disclose who can technically add, delete and restore a voter.
It says democracy is functioning.
Then demonstrate it.
Because the Election Commission does not have to ask citizens to trust it.
It has to give citizens reasons to trust it.
And if those reasons are not forthcoming, the crisis will no longer be merely about SIR.
It will be about the credibility of Indian elections themselves.
The most dangerous moment for a democracy is not when citizens lose an election.
It is when they begin to doubt whether they were allowed to participate in it on equal terms.
India must not reach that point.
Because once the citizen stops believing that the ballot belongs to him, the constitutional promise of universal adult franchise becomes only a line in a book.
And a democracy whose citizens no longer trust the ballot has already begun to lose the thing elections are supposed to protect.
The vote.
References
1. The Indian Express — “14 times in 10 months, two Election Commissioners objected on record to poll panel steps” — the principal source for the 14 objections, Form 6, ECINET centralisation, West Bengal appeals and the internal ECI dispute.
Indian Express — 14 objections investigation
2. The Indian Express — “Election Commissioners knocked on Cabinet Secretary’s door over voter software integrity” — detailed chronology of the ECINET/ERONet dispute, ERO powers, IT centralisation and the Cabinet Secretary correspondence.
Indian Express — ECINET investigation
3. The Indian Express — “Illegal, unauthorised: Election Commissioners objected to Form 6 change” — evidence concerning the alteration of Form 6 despite the objections recorded by two Commissioners.
Indian Express — Form 6 investigation
4. Supreme Court of India — Association for Democratic Reforms v Election Commission of India, 27 May 2026, 2026 INSC 564 — authoritative source for the Bihar SIR litigation, Article 324/Section 21(3), 65-lakh draft exclusion, Aadhaar directions and the Court's eventual upholding of SIR.
Supreme Court — Bihar SIR judgment summary
5. Representation of the People Act, 1950 — India Code — Sections 21, 22, 23 and 24 concerning preparation/revision, correction/deletion, inclusion and appeals.
India Code — Representation of the People Act, 1950
6. Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 — India Code — statutory rules governing electoral-roll preparation, revision, claims, objections and appeals.
Registration of Electors Rules, 1960
7. Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023 — India Code — particularly Sections 7, 16 and 18 concerning the Selection Committee, protection/immunity and Commission decision-making.
Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023
8. Supreme Court — Anoop Baranwal v Union of India, 2 March 2023 — five-judge Constitution Bench decision concerning the appointment mechanism for Election Commissioners.
Anoop Baranwal judgment
9. The Indian Express — West Bengal SIR and appeals — 27.16 lakh deletions, 22.21 lakh appeals by deleted voters, 38.31 lakh total appeals and only 1,607 reinstatements before the Assembly election.
Indian Express — West Bengal SIR appeals
10. The Indian Express — Delhi SIR — 47.7 lakh names removed from the draft roll and more than 33 lakh notices; the Supreme Court subsequently questioned whether notices appeared to have been issued “mechanically”.
Indian Express — Delhi SIR draft roll
11. The Indian Express — 91% restoration in an early Bengal tribunal batch — useful evidence of how disputed exclusions were subsequently reversed when appeals were actually heard.
Indian Express — Bengal tribunal restoration data
