The Special Intensive Revision (SIR), even though a legally mandated duty of the Election Commission of India (ECI), a constitutional and autonomous body responsible for conducting free and fair elections, has become a contentious issue between opposition parties, rights groups, and the central government.

On June 24, 2025, the ECI issued a notice for the SIR of electoral rolls in Bihar. In a press note, the ECI said, "The objective of an intensified revision is to ensure that the names of all eligible citizens are included in the Electoral Roll so as to enable them to exercise their franchise, no ineligible voter is included in the electoral rolls and also to introduce complete transparency in the process of addition or deletion of electors in the electoral rolls."

This exercise, if conducted in good faith, constitutes an important part of India's democratic setup. However, ever since the BJP formed the government at the Centre with Narendra Modi as Prime Minister, even such constitutional processes have become a part of the government's exclusionary agenda. Now, they are never what they seem on the surface but are always a political tool for consolidating power by disenfranchising marginalised groups, especially the Muslim minority.

The state elections in Bihar are due by the end of this year. The state is one of the very rare Hindi-speaking states where the BJP-RSS politics of Hindutva has yet to gain ground. Although the BJP has been a part of Bihar’s ruling coalition for two decades, its core politics of Hindutva could never outshine the OBC politics, as it could elsewhere in India. One such example is Maharashtra, where it played the role of a junior partner until recently but is now the leading partner.

For the BJP, the failure of its Hindutva project in Bihar is due to a strong OBC Yadav and Muslim alliance built by a coalition of Left parties such as the CPI, CPM, and CPIML, and Samajwadi leaders such as Lalu Prasad Yadav. Currently, even the Congress is part of the alliance. Yadavs and Muslims together constitute around 30 per cent of the state's total population. These two groups have long resisted the BJP-RSS politics.

As mentioned above the BJP has been in power in the state for almost 20 years in a coalition with the JDU, a breakaway faction of Janata Dal, it could never create its own strong voting base among non-Yadav OBCs, as it did in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh. This happened because the JDU, thanks to its leader Nitish Kumar, has a strong base among non-Yadav OBCs such as Kurmi, Koeri, Extremely Backward Classes (36 per cent of the state’s population), and Maha Dalits. Since both Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal United emerged from the Janata Dal, an anti-Congress alliance, and continued the politics of social justice for marginalised castes, the politics in this Hindi state naturally remained mostly anti-BJP-RSS.

The failure to form a government on its own in Bihar is seen by Modi as a great personal failure. This is why he is using everything he can to win Bihar. In this regard, he is now using the constitutional power of the ECI, just as he has previously used other state agencies, such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). While both the ED and the CBI have been used to pressure dissenting leaders, with the ECI’s help the BJP is trying to disenfranchise dissident voters.

The way the ongoing SIR is being conducted betrays the BJP’s desperation to win Bihar, as well as the ECI’s subversion of its core mandate to ensure that every adult Indian gets to vote as a constitutional right. Never before has the ECI conducted such a process as a citizenship conferment exercise. The ECI cannot, as per the Citizenship Act, decide who is a citizen of India and who is not. But this time the process is twisted into an exercise of citizenship determination. Time and again, the highest court has acknowledged that the determination of citizenship is the business of the government, not of the ECI.

The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), a civil rights group, has said that the ECI’s claim of authority to verify citizenship goes against earlier Supreme Court decisions. The ADR, in its submission before the Supreme Court, cited Lal Babu Hussain vs. Union of India (1995), which stated that the burden of proving citizenship lies with new applicants, not existing voters. It also referenced Inderjit Barua vs. ECI (1985), where the court held that being on the electoral roll is strong proof of citizenship, and the onus to disprove it lies with those who object. However, this time the onus to disprove has been put on the people.

ADR also criticised the ECI’s directive requiring voters added after 2003 to produce one of 11 specified documents, saying this wrongly shifts the burden of proof to voters. “It is submitted that the SIR process shifts the onus of citizenship proof on all existing electors in a state, whose names were registered by the ECI through a due process,” ADR has said in its submission.

As of the time of writing, the ECI has issued a provisional list of voters, without mentioning reasons, who are excluded from the new voters’ list. The number of such voters is a staggering 6.5 million. This number may rise because of the confusion earlier created by the ECI’s own order in which it said that no document is required in the initial stage. But as the list goes into the screening stages, the people whose names have appeared in the first list but have not submitted any documents will automatically be deleted. Such is the state of a body that is given the responsibility of conducting free and fair elections.

The manner in which the ECI has argued in the Supreme Court also exposes its intention. In its various submissions, the ECI has yet to clarify why it has excluded three major documents as proof of voters and why it has rushed through the process even when many of the state's voters are migrant workers living in distant parts of the country.

If the Special Intensive Revision process is allowed to continue in its current form, it risks further marginalising the weakest sections of society. The threat to the voting rights of poor Indians is very real. What is happening in Bihar is not an isolated incident but rather fits into a pattern seen in other states, such as Maharashtra and Karnataka, where millions of fake voters were allegedly allowed to exist, helping the BJP win seats. The Election Commission's actions pose a genuine threat to what little integrity remains in India's already weakened electoral process.

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