SC says SIR fortifies electoral process, asks EC to furnish deleted voters’ list in four weeks

The Supreme Court observed that the impugned SIR does not supplant the Representation of the People Act and the Rules, but rather strengthens the constitutional mandate to ensure “integrity, accuracy, and credibility” for a free and fair electoral process, while pronouncing its verdict on a batch of pleas questioning whether the EC had the authority to undertake such a process in Bihar.

A bench comprising Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi upheld the powers of the Election Commission of India to conduct Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, while directing the poll panel to furnish to the Union Government, within four weeks, the names of persons deleted from the rolls over doubtful citizenship.

Delivering the judgment, the bench examined whether the Commission derived authority under Article 326 of the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the Rules framed thereunder to carry out the SIR in its present architecture, and held that Section 21(3) of the statute explicitly empowered the Commission to order a special revision whenever circumstances warranted such intervention.

The court observed that when the statute itself authorised a special revision “at any time”, for reasons to be recorded and in such manner as deemed appropriate by the Commission, the exercise could not be invalidated merely because it departed from the ordinary modalities governing routine revisions, while further underlining that the SIR bore a “direct nexus” to the constitutional objective of preserving free and fair elections.

The bench emphatically remarked that electoral democracy did not merely hinge upon the mechanics of polling day, but fundamentally rested upon the sanctity and credibility of electoral rolls, which constituted the bedrock of representative governance.

It further noted that factors cited by the Commission, including the passage of over four decades since the last intensive revision, relentless migration, rapid urbanisation, and large-scale additions and deletions over the years, had generated legitimate concerns regarding duplication and inaccuracies in the voter database.

Most petitions challenging the SIR had been instituted after the Commission initiated the exercise in Bihar last year, with petitioners including the Association for Democratic Reforms, political activist Yogendra Yadav, and parliamentarians Mahua Moitra, Manoj Jha, K. C. Venugopal and Supriya Sule, all of whom had assailed the exercise as an unprecedented mechanism capable of weaponising voter verification.