Author: Shashvat, B.A. LL.B. Third Year, ILS Law College, Pune
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, initiated by the Election Commission of India in Bihar in June 2025 and subsequently extended nationwide, represents the mostconsequential exercise of administrative power over India’selectoral rolls since the Constitution’s inception. Conducted under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, the SIR sought to reconstruct electoral rolls through house-to-house enumeration,treating the 2003 roll as a presumptive reference point and requiring voters added thereafter to discharge an affirmative documentary burden of eligibility. The exercise resulted in the deletion of approximately sixty-five lakh names from Bihar’s draft rolls alone, triggering a constitutional challenge in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission ofIndia before the Supreme Court of India. On 27 May 2026, abench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant unanimously upheld the SIR’s constitutional validity, applying a four-step proportionality framework. This article critically examines the judgment’s doctrinal architecture, its treatment of the presumption of citizenship established in Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer, and the broader implications for the constitutional guarantee of free and fair elections under Part XV.
The SIR controversy crystallises a foundational tension inelectoral administration: the conflict between the Election Commission’s constitutional mandate to maintain accurate electoral rolls and the individual citizen’s right to continued enfranchisement absent due process. The ECI justified the exercise on the ground that Bihar’s rolls had not undergone an intensive revision since 2003, and that two decades of urbanisation, migration, and unreported deaths had compromisedtheir accuracy. Petitioners — led by the Association forDemocratic Reforms, activist Yogendra Yadav, and severalopposition parliamentarians — argued that the SIR’s designinverted the settled presumption that an
enrolled elector’s name carries a rebuttable presumption of validity, placing instead an affirmative burden on the voter toprove eligibility through documentary evidence within a compressed thirty-day window. The friction was sharpened byscale: approximately sixty-five lakh names were initially omitted from Bihar’s draft roll published on 1 August 2025, and by the time West Bengal’s SIR concluded, over ninety-one lakh names — nearly twelve percent of the pre-revision electorate — had been erased. The Supreme Court’s intervention, culminating in the 27 May 2026 judgment, did not strike down the SIR but substantially reshaped it through a sequence of interim orders requiring transparency, documentary flexibility, and procedural safeguards before ultimately upholding its constitutional validity.
Background: The SIR Exercise and ItsProcedural Architecture
The Election Commission’s notification of 24 June 2025 directed a Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls ahead of the State’s Legislative Assembly elections, anticipated later that year. Under Clause 11 of the impugned order, the 2003 electoral roll — with 1 January 2003 fixed as the qualifying date — was to be treated as probative evidence of eligibility for existing electors, unless rebutted. Clause 12 required any elector not listed in the 2003 roll to produce one or more of eleven prescribed documents to establish eligibility afresh. Enumeration forms were to be submitted by 25 July 2025, failing which theelector’s name would be excluded from the draft roll altogether
— a reverse-burden structure that placed the onus of provingcontinued eligibility squarely on the citizen rather than on the State to justify deletion.
The initial documentary framework excluded several widely held identity documents, including Aadhaar, the Electors Photo Identity Card, and ration cards, prompting immediate constitutional challenge. Following the Court’s interim intervention on 14 August 2025, the Commission was directed to publish a district-wise, booth-level list of all excluded electors with stated reasons, ensuring wide publicity through print, electronic, and radio media. On 8 September 2025, the Court directed that Aadhaar be accepted as a twelfth document for the limited purpose of establishing identity — while clarifying that Aadhaar does not constitute proof of citizenship. The final electoral roll, published on 30 September 2025, recorded 7.42 crore electors against a pre-SIR figure of 7.89 crore — a netreduction of approximately forty-seven lakh names, attributed to
twenty-two lakh deceased voters, thirty-six lakh migrated oruntraceable individuals, and seven lakh duplicate entries.
The Case For: Electoral Integrity as aConstitutional Mandate
The strongest justification for the SIR rests on the proposition that accurate electoral rolls are not a procedural nicety but a substantive precondition for free and fair electionsunder Article 326 and Part XV of the Constitution. The ECI’sposition, ultimately vindicated by the Supreme Court, was that Article 324 vests it with plenary power of superintendence, direction, and control over elections — a power the Court held to be a living constitutional source rather than a dead lettersubordinate to the Representation of the People Act. The bench reasoned that Article 327, which empowers Parliament to legislate on elections, is itself expressly made subject to the Constitution; Parliament’s statutory framework could not, therefore, be read as exhausting or overriding the Commission’sconstitutional mandate. On this reading, the SIR was not anextra-statutory innovation, but a direct exercise of Article 324 read with Section 21(3) of the RPA, undertaken to advance the very purpose Part XV was designed to protect.
The Court applied a four-step proportionality test drawn from Modern Dental College (2016) and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017): whether the measurepursues a legitimate purpose, whether the means chosen bear arational nexus to that purpose, whether a less restrictive alternative was reasonably available, and whether the public benefit outweighs the burden imposed on the right. The Court found the purpose — restoring the accuracy of rolls left unrevised for over two decades — unquestionably legitimate. It held that house-to-house enumeration, structured enumeration forms, and documentary verification bore a rational connection to that purpose, and that no less restrictive alternative had been concretely proposed by the petitioners beyond abstract objection.Critically, the Court emphasised that the procedural safeguards eventually built into the SIR Guidelines — suo motu enquiry, show-cause notice, reasoned orders, and a two-tier appellatemechanism under Section 24 of the RPA
— together with the Court’s own supervisory directions, preserved the constitutional balance between electoral integrity and individual enfranchisement.
The Case Against: Reverse Burdens and theErosion of Settled Presumptions
The petitioners’ central doctrinal objection drew on Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer (1995), which had held that an elector’s existing enrolment carries a presumption of citizenship and eligibility that cannot be displaced except through the procedure prescribed by law. The SIR’s architecture, petitioners argued, inverted this presumption: rather than requiring the State to justify deletion through individualised inquiry, it required every elector outside the narrow 2003 reference class to affirmatively re-establisheligibility within a compressed window, on pain of automaticexclusion. Critics observed that this reverse-burden structure disproportionately disadvantaged precisely those constituencies least equipped to discharge it — migrant workers with shifting addresses, the urban and rural poor in informal housing, Dalit and Adivasi communities with historically thin documentary records, and minority populations whose citizenship has, in various political contexts, already been rendered a subject of scrutiny.
The timing and design of the documentary regime compounded these concerns. Aadhaar, arguably the most widely held identity document among India’s poor, was excluded fromthe original eleven-document list and added only after judicialintervention in September 2025 — by which point the first enumeration form had already been submitted, and even after inclusion it reached only 87.68 percent of Bihar’s electorate, falling short of universal coverage. Critics of the judgment, including academic commentary published shortly after theverdict, have characterised the Court’s reasoning as internally inconsistent: the bench acknowledged at paragraph 97 that the SIR “as initially designed did raise legitimate concerns regarding documentation, transparency, and access,” while simultaneously holding that these concerns were cured by judicial interventions that came after the fact, for electors who had, in the interim, already been excluded from the draft rolls without the benefit of those very safeguards.
A further structural concern, raised acutely in the parallel West Bengal proceedings, was the scale and speed of citizenship-adjacent scrutiny embedded within the exercise: reports indicated that over 1.5 crore quasi-judicial hearing notices were issued within fewer than twenty days, raising serious questions about whether the individualised notice-and-hearing safeguard mandated by Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 could be meaningfully discharged at such volume, or whether the requirement had been reduced to a procedural formality incapable of producing genuine adjudicative scrutiny in each case.
Case Law: The Jurisprudential Framework
Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer (1995)
This earlier decision established that the presumption of citizenship and eligibility attaching to an already-enrolledelector cannot be displaced except through procedurally fairadjudication, with individualised notice and hearing precedingdeletion. The Supreme Court in ADR v. ECI distinguished ratherthan overruled Lal Babu Hussein, holding that it had been decided in the context of specific adjudicatory proceedings targeting identified individuals, and did not extend to a systemic, mandate-driven exercise of roll reconstruction. The Court held that the presumption of validity arising from enrolment remainsrebuttable and does not impose a blanket embargo on theCommission’s power to conduct a special revision. Thisdistinction has attracted sustained academic criticism: commentators argue that converting an individual adjudicatory safeguard into an inapplicable precedent for mass administrative exercises risks hollowing out the protection Lal Babu Hussein was designed to provide, particularly where the practical consequence for the excluded elector remains materially identical.
Modern Dental College and Research Society v. Stateof Madhya Pradesh (2016) and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017)
These judgments together furnish the four-step proportionality doctrine now standard in Indian constitutional review: legitimate purpose, suitability of means, necessity(absence of a less restrictive alternative), and a final balancing ofpublic benefit against individual burden. Its application in ADR v. ECI to an administrative-electoral context, rather than the more familiar privacy or trade-restriction settings, signals an important extension: proportionality review now reaches administrative mechanisms indirectly burdening the right tovote, itself rooted in Articles 14, 19(1)(a), and 21 through the trajectory from Kuldip Nayar through PUCL to Anoop Baranwal v. Union of India.
Association for Democratic Reforms v. ElectionCommission of India (2026)
The judgment itself, delivered by Chief Justice Surya Kant for a bench including Justice Joymalya Bagchi, addressed fourcore questions: whether the ECI possessed the power to conduct the SIR; whether the exercise pursued a legitimate purpose and satisfied proportionality; whether its procedure violated theRepresentation of the People Act, 1950 and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960; and whether the Commission could, in thecourse of roll maintenance, conduct a limited inquiry intocitizenship. On each
question, the Court ruled in the Commission’s favour, while simultaneously crediting its own sequence of interiminterventions — the Aadhaar direction, the publication mandate, the Booth Level Agent requirement — as having cured the deficiencies that would otherwise have rendered the exercise constitutionally infirm. The Court was careful to clarify that the ECI’s power to inquire into citizenship for electoral purposes is limited: where doubt persists, the matter must be referred to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955, and theCommission does not possess final authority to adjudicate citizenship status. Justice Bagchi’s observation, made during hearings, that the Court would “apply its mind” should any constituency’s electoral margin prove narrow relative to the scale of exclusions, signals a continuing — if reactive — judicial willingness to scrutinise outcomes even after the framework’s general validity has been affirmed.
Conclusion: Proportionality Affirmed, VigilanceRequired
The judgment in Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India represents a significant doctrinalachievement on its own terms: it affirms that Article 324 remains a substantive, living constitutional power; it extends proportionality review into the domain of electoral administration; and it preserves a meaningful, if narrow, ceiling on the Commission’s citizenship-adjacent authority by reserving final determination to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act. These are not insignificant safeguards, and the Court’s repeated interim interventions — the Aadhaar direction chief among them — demonstrate an institution actively shaping the exercise it ultimately approved, rather than passively ratifying executive action.
Yet the judgment’s own internal logic raises an uncomfortable structural question for India’s election law going forward: a process is validated, in significant part, because the Court itself repaired its defects as they emerged — but the citizens excluded during the gap between the SIR’s flawed initial design and the Court’s subsequent corrections received no comparable remedy. The four-step proportionality framework, while doctrinally rigorous in form, risks becoming a retrospective justification exercise unless future iterations of the SIR — already underway or imminent in numerous additional States — incorporate the safeguards Bihar required as a precondition rather than a judicial afterthought. The distinction drawn between Lal Babu Hussein’s adjudicatory context and the SIR’s systemic character, while legally coherent, should notobscure the practical reality that the consequence for anindividual elector — disenfranchisement
without genuine prior hearing — remains the same regardless ofwhether the mechanism causing it is labelled adjudicatory or systemic.
The path forward lies in institutionalising, ex ante, the safeguards the Court was compelled to impose ex post in Bihar: mandatory inclusion of widely held identity documents from the outset, individualised reasoned notice before deletion, adequate response time calibrated to documentary access realities, anduniform application across every State conducting an SIR, rather than relying on litigation in each jurisdiction to extract comparable protection. Electoral roll integrity and electoral inclusion are not competing values to be balanced in theabstract; they are jointly necessary conditions for the free and fair elections Part XV exists to guarantee, and neither should consistently trump the other through design choices corrected only after the fact, for those electors with the resources to seek judicial recourse.
