Pan-India SIR aims to avoid Bihar pangs

THE searchlight has never focused as sharply on the integrity of the electoral rolls (ER) as recently. The Election Commission of India (ECI) reiterated its resolve to maintaining its sanctity by removing those ‘ineligible’ and including those ‘eligible’, while announcing Phase 2 of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in 12 states and UTs.

Phase 1 of this exercise in Bihar raised an unprecedented din and doubt, causing some dust to cloud the ECI’s credibility. In announcing Phase 2, the ECI seems to have weathered the storm despite the last word from the Supreme Court (SC), which is set to hear the case on November 4. Strangely, that is the date on which the enumeration process of Phase 2 will start. The ECI appears determined to assert its constitutional authority in carrying the process forward, no matter what the opposition. Despite several interventions by the SC, the authority of the ECI to revise the ER was never in doubt, however questionable was the process it initially notified for Bihar.

In my previous article published in this newspaper (‘To SIR with love across the country’, September 27), I said that the initial “notification of June 24 announcing the SIR cannot be the template for the rest of the country.” This was clear from the many changes made by the ECI on its own and due to court orders during Phase 1, and is further evident from the many changes made for Phase 2. The ECI would have surely benefited from the practical suggestions of the state Chief Electoral Officers (CEO) in its two meetings before launching this phase of the nationwide exercise.

That this important announcement was made at a press conference, not abruptly notified through a press note as in June, is welcome. The ECI answered many questions at the press conference, although it left some crucial ones, particularly on foreigners, unanswered.

The changes this time aim at easing the procedure without altering the basic approach of making the existing electors primarily responsible for their re-registration, which was the fundamental shift from the traditional approach and had led to considerable flak. However, unlike in Bihar, electors are not required to submit documents at the enumeration stage.

The booth-level officers (BLOs) would ascertain their eligibility by linking their details to entries in the ER prepared after the last intensive revision, both for the electors and their relatives, which would be sufficient to establish their eligibility.

In the case of Bihar, only the 2003 ER of the state was referred to, but now the ER of any state can be referred to for proof of eligibility. Notices will be served on all those whose names cannot be linked to previous entries and an opportunity provided to them to submit the prescribed documentary evidence after the publication of the draft roll, thus limiting the number of electors required to submit documents.

The Bihar SIR was criticised for being ‘exclusionary’ as the registration of new electors was deferred until the claims and objections stage. This time, BLOs will carry forms for first-time voters with reference to their coming of age on January 1, 2026. The electoral registration officers (EROs) have been asked to “invite advance applications for subsequent qualifying dates” — the 1st of April, July and October, 2026. Further, the procedural drawback in the previous SIR of not asking BLOs to conduct any survey to ascertain migration/death etc. has been corrected by instructing BLOs to “identify a probable cause, such as Absent/Shifted/Death/Duplicate, based on an inquiry from the nearby electors”, thus adding a human element to a mechanical process.

As expected, the ECI has incorporated the SC’s directions of displaying booth-wise lists of electors whose names are not included in the draft roll “to enable the general public to have access to the aforesaid voter lists along with the probable reasons for non-inclusion of their names” and the CEOs “to consolidate and put these lists on the CEO’s website in an accessible format.”

The ECI has added the final Bihar ER to the earlier list of 11 prescribed documents, and included Aadhaar card by stating that it was not a proof of citizenship, overlooking the criticism that most other documents too were not proof of citizenship.

That leaves the contentious issue of citizenship implicit in the entire exercise, making the ECI susceptible to charges of “conducting the NRC through the backdoor” even though it hasn’t been able to so far declare the number of non-citizens ‘excluded’ in Bihar. In transferring the onus of proof on the existing electors, there could be an unstated hope that “non-citizens” who had managed to infiltrate into the ER would be deterred from submitting their forms again.

It is hard to say if this is a tactical ploy, but it could achieve the intended exclusion of non-citizens, otherwise legally possible only by following the existing procedure of objections and inquiry.

Also open is the fundamental debate whether this kind of SIR is the only way of achieving ‘purification’ of the ER, which could be done by following the process prescribed by law. It would have been better if before attempting a clean-up through an all-India SIR, the ECI had thoroughly audited the existing ER of the states to identify discrepancies in house numbering, garbled parents’ names, a disproportionate number of people staying at one address and duplicate entries, etc. so as to conduct a targeted rectification.

The ECI would inspire greater confidence if it published the entire data of the Bihar SIR, providing details of the type of documents submitted by different categories of electors that enabled them to be declared ‘eligible’ and a similar breakup of all those found ineligible. It should also do a health analysis of the draft ER to identify the polling stations showing abnormal decrease/increase or gender ratio for immediate detailed scrutiny and for full transparency.

Even though the ECI is at pains to declare the hasty Bihar SIR an unqualified success, it seems to have learnt some lessons from the Bihar experience without admitting so. The political parties should also learn their lessons and gear up, remain alert and play their part actively without expecting any accommodating stance from the regulator of universal adult suffrage or the courts.