SIR marks new trajectory; a bureaucratic tool for electoral roll purge before polls
Telegraph | 17 April 2026
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in 2025-26 marks a new trajectory for the Indian state in a post-CAA and NRC regime, aiming to determine the authenticity of citizens through bureaucratic infrastructure.
Much like the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), the SIR is also an administrative exercise involved in the dual processes of inclusion and exclusion of people in a participatory democracy.
The SIR resembles a Census exercise, with booth-level officers (BLOs) making door-to-door visits to verify voters’ information and collect completed enumeration forms along with supporting documents for registering electorates in the electoral roll.
The Election Commission of India (ECI) has listed rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, eligibility of young voters, non-reporting of deaths and inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants as the main reasons for the intensive revision to “ensure integrity and preparation of error-free electoral rolls”.
However, no list of “illegal immigrants” has been issued by the ECI after the SIR process.
The ECI maintained that voter I-cards, PAN cards, ration cards, and driving licences are not valid proof of an elector’s identity. It is surprising that during the annual voter enrolment exercises via Form 6, both the PAN card and the driving licence are considered valid documents on the ECI portal. Similarly, for Form 8 corrections of names and address changes, several documents are considered valid on the ECI portal that were not included in the list of 13 documents meant for the SIR in Bengal.
According to an official booklet of the ECI, the SIR was conducted eight times between 1951 and 2004, and the last nationwide SIR was conducted between 2002 and 2004. Since there was no mention of the term ‘special’ in the provisions of Article 324 of the Constitution of India, Section 21, along with other applicable provisions of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the relevant provisions of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, the previous exercises were all Intensive Revision (IR) rather than SIR, where the burden of proof of citizenship with several documents was not put on genuine voters.
Regarding “indicative” 4
and “not exhaustive” documents, the ECI has listed 13 in total for Phase 2 of SIR.
Hierarchy of papers
If one examines the ECI list of documents, two documents, numbered 9 (NRC) and 13 (Bihar SIR Electoral Roll), are state-specific and are irrelevant to a significant portion of the population undergoing the SIR nationwide. Second, Aadhaar (number 12 on the ECI list) was not initially part of the SIR in Bihar.
Hearing a PIL on July 10, 2025, the Supreme Court opined that “it would be in the interest of justice if the Election Commission of India also considers the following three documents as well (apart from the 11 documents mentioned in order dated 24.06.2025), i.e. A) Aadhaar card; B) Electors Photo Identify Card (EPIC), which is issued by Election Commission of India itself, and C) the Ration Card” since the ECI list of documents is “not exhaustive”.
Finally, on September 8, 2025, the Supreme Court made it clear that the Aadhaar card must be accepted as “a proof of identity” and not as “a proof of citizenship” by the ECI for the SIR.
This particular legal discourse makes citizenship discourse fluid and contested, while deliberately restricting a section of genuine voters from remaining on the electoral roll.
On the one hand, the Constitution of India treats “domicile” as a ground of citizenship or if either of one’s parents was born in Indian territory, according to the provisions of Article 5 of the Indian Constitution. But how does one prove one’s domicile or residence? Surely, Aadhaar and several other documents, such as ration cards and EPIC, should be treated as proof of domicile, as they contain a person’s local address within Indian territory.
In other words, the ECI is already establishing a hierarchy among several types of documents for voters, where PAN card, ration card, EPIC and driving licence are not considered as important as the ECI’s enumerated documents for SIR.
Furthermore, the exclusion of EPIC from the enumerated list of documents issued by the ECI seems ludicrous, since the unique EPIC number is also printed on the enumeration forms distributed to voters by the BLOs.
It is indeed puzzling that the ECI has not included the EPIC, even though the EPIC number is already part of the SIR exercise. It would have been far more convenient to match the EPIC number with voters’ EPICs to authenticate for the SIR exercise.
Elitist bias
The ECI list of enumerated documents certainly has an elitist bias.
The list of documents tends to favour not only the literate population groups but also those in government employment or seeking higher education.
Right from the beginning, the ECI’s design was to exclude voters rather than ensure genuine voters are included in the electoral roll. The Calcutta High Court Chief Justice has reported to the Supreme Court that by April 11, 2026, 34.35 lakh appeals have been registered and are pending before the 19 appellate tribunals.
The observation of Justice Joymalya Bagchi, whose Bengali name has been incorrectly printed in the electoral roll, raises several questions regarding the veracity of the SIR exercise, where the “logical discrepancy” was not used in the Bihar SIR while being used in Bengal and resulted in over 27 lakh deletions and how an election result could be questioned if the winning margin is much lesser than the number of voter deletions in a particular Assembly constituency.
The manner in which the entire SIR exercise was conducted in Bengal not only showed administrative lacunae and a lack of information for common voters, but also harassed crores of genuine voters who had been initially promised that they did not have to show any documents if they had been mapped to the 2002 electoral roll.
The SIR process in Bengal, particularly, resulted in a fraudulent, non-transparent exercise that led to mass disenfranchisement.
Maidul Islam is a professor of political science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta