Shikha Mukerjee | Bizarre SIR Rules: What’s EC Up To Over Bihar Polls?

The Assembly elections in Bihar at the end of 2025 will be a watershed moment in India’s turbulent history with elections and democracy. It could overturn the flawed but functioning system of an election based on the ideals of universal adult franchise that was instituted in 1950. The first general election in 1951 is considered one of India’s greatest adventures of successfully empowering its people. It was an affirmation of the idea that each adult individual of the republic was a sovereign, the person who held the power to decide who would represent her/him and what the government would do with the power it was bequeathed.

Simplistic and hopelessly romantic as this interpretation of the election process may appear to cynics and unbelievers of the idea of democracy, the reality is that since 1951, Indians as voters have understood the power of the vote. The Election Commission’s current actions seem to be targeting that power by challenging the legitimacy of the voter as an Indian citizen.

The July 9 Bihar-wide protest called by the Congress and the Rash-triya Janata Dal, the principal regional Oppo-sition party, against the Election Commi-ssion’s bizarre directives for the 2025 Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is a delayed response to an urgent political challenge. The EC’s job is to verify that the listed voter is indeed 18 years of age, resident at a specific address, and they are indeed who they claim to be and not listed under a false name.

The EC’s job as defined by the Constitution is limited. Article 324(1) states: “The superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of the electoral rolls for, and the conduct of, all elections to Parliament and to the legislature of every state” shall be the job of the EC. It does not empower the EC to verify the citizenship of voters; that is the job of the National Register of Citizens.

The recently-appointed 26th Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, announced he was a new broom in a new Election Commission. That is a contradiction in terms; he cannot head a new body that was established under the Constitution in 1950.

Instead of doing that, the EC has declared a cut-off date, 2003, which was when the previous SIR was done, for verification of citizenship status. The issue is the EC has also claimed that it has distributed forms to about eight crore voters, which is almost the entire voting population of Bihar. In order to get this done by July-end, the EC has appointed five lakh booth officers; who these people are and how are they qualified to do the job of SIR based on the new rules is unclear and therefore suspect.

The Election Commission has made it clear it will unroll SIR in other states, presumably the Opposition-ruled states of West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and BJP-ruled Assam in the next round of Assembly elections, due in 2026.

The “new” model of verification of voters’ legitimacy introduced by the Bihar SIR is a challenge to parties opposed to the NDA led by the BJP. It is also a challenge to the other parties in the NDA from Bihar as well as other states, because the new SIR process questions the identity of all voters, who cannot provide the peculiar list of documents the EC has arbitrarily decided are necessary to prove citizenship.

It is not too late to raise the alarm, nationwide, over how the “new” EC by its actions is challenging the right of every 18-year-old, presumed Indian, to vote under the principle of universal adult franchise. It is probably necessary for affected voters to demonstrate their power, as the sovereign, by participating in the protests led by the Opposition parties. The SIR’s format has seriously sinister implications for the idea of universal adult franchise and free and fair elections.

By the EC’s reckoning, some two crore voters in Bihar are suspect as legitimate, out of a total of eight crore voters in the state; if 25 per cent of the electorate of a state is suspected to be illegitimate, then it does call into question the legitimacy of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, in Bihar as well as across the country. Bihar does not have a 2,271-km long and mostly open border with Nepal. The issue of “illegal immigrants” inflating the number of voters in Bihar has not been a political hot potato in quite the same way as it has been in West Bengal and Assam.

If the EC presumes that 25 per cent of voters are not eligible to vote, because the EC determines that they may not be Indian citizens at all, then the EC and the 11-year-old Narendra Modi government are answerable for colluding in the election of successive governments over the years of doubtful legitimacy.

The July 9 protests in Bihar could turn into an ugly showdown between the Election Commission and the Opposition parties, because the parties with the National Democratic Alliance led by the BJP are conspicuously unconcerned by the prospect of “de-voterisation” or “vote bandi”, as it is being described in the social media. The absence of concern, presumably because the committed voters of these parties will not be adversely hit by the verification, is why there is snowballing speculation that the “vote bandi” will be politically targeted.

The EC over the decades has acquired a reputation of being in the service of the ruling party at the Centre. Every party, whenever it is in the Opposition, shouts itself hoarse saying so. Whether true or not, the EC’s SIR formula, be it based, as the speculation suggests, on guidelines suggested by either a very confident or a very scared government, to allegedly cook the voters list, is nevertheless a “free” offer to the Opposition.

If the fractured Opposition squanders the opportunity to mend and meld itself into a unified force on the issue of disenfranchisement, it will have failed in its basic responsibility of representing all voters, threatened as they are by the EC’s new rules of verification. Profligate as the Congress tends to be, it has been handed a gift by the EC. And it needs to get its act together quickly. The same expectation that they will tackle the problem created by the EC’s SIR format subverting the political rights of the people and the power of the sovereign also applies to the basket of Left parties in India.

Shikha Mukerjee is a senior journalist based in Kolkata