Shikha Mukerjee | My Identity Is My Vote: Supreme Court & SIR

Everything now goes back to the vote you cast; your identity, your entitlements and your rights. The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls exercise in Bihar, albeit 10 months after the state Assembly elections got over, one chief minister was ousted and another has assumed office. It has also opened up the SIR exercise or process. It is not never ending, though it does seem so.

There is a lot of back and forth that appears nerve-wracking and time consuming on the one hand, and expensive on the other, following from the Supreme Court’s deliberations and decisions, that the EC is not competent to decide on who is or is not a citizen. Therefore, the Union home ministry must get in on the act and verify by the means at its disposal whether an individual is a citizen or a “ghuspaithiya”, an illegal infiltrator, suspected to be masquerading as a legal citizen.

In the Supreme Court’s view, the cart and the horse cannot be separated; “The commission’s determination being confined to electoral purposes cannot assume finality on the question of citizenship. Any deletion effected on this ground shall therefore remain subject to the outcome of such adjudication by the appropriate authority.” Once the home ministry has taken a decision, it needs to inform the EC. Thereafter, the EC will, once more, revise the voters’ list to include, hopefully permanently, a verified citizen’s name or permanently exclude an ineligible non-citizen from the electoral rolls.

At the end of the exercise, entirely approved by the Supreme Court, the hapless individual will have been verified multiple times, subjected to documents being scrutinised and his/her genealogy being examined. The oddest part of this multiple verification process is the EC’s decision to set a cut-off date -- the 2002/2003 intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Is the 2002/2003 electoral roll the point when the roll was deemed to be more or less “pure”? Or, is it that the year was when the last intensive revision happened? The question is not frivolous, because with “purity” in mind, it does matter; when did the impurities began to creep in and when did the EC wake up to the fact that it was happening? Was it precisely 23 years after the last intensive revision, coinciding with the state Assembly election in Bihar?

Inclusion in or exclusion from the voters’ list has become the determinant of inclusion in or exclusion from entitlements. If the individual is in the voters’ list, he or she has rights; if he/she is deleted, he/she has no rights. The conditions laid down by the BJP’s newest jewel in the crown, West Bengal, for identifying beneficiaries of direct cash transfer schemes or other similar disbursals, includes status in the voters list. If the woman, expecting to benefit from the hiked-up “Annapurna Yojana”, aka “Lakshmir Bhandar”, is an eligible voter as per the SIR list, she will have no difficulties in applying for and receiving money. If her name has been deleted, or put on the “under adjudication” list, and if she has applied to the tribunal for inclusion of her name, she will not get the Rs 3,000 cash.

Though, if, in the meantime, she has applied for citizenship and received a “domicile certificate”, then she will be entitled to the benefits.

This is a neat puzzle; citizen or not, so long as there is a certificate, the woman is entitled to receive benefits. Elected governments, in other words, prefer to create loopholes to deliver benefits to people assuming that they are voters. It does make nonsense of the new chief minister Suvendu Adhikari’s aggressive statements that Bangladeshis or non-citizens will not get even a paisa. The compulsions of electoral politics are heavily dependent on perception; clearly, delivering benefits even to Bangladeshis makes political sense, no matter what the Supreme Court may think about the matter.

The Supreme Court verdict pins democracy down to the “integrity, accuracy, and purity of the electoral roll”, as the foundation of the republic. That is stretching the point beyond reason.

Democracy is as much about freedom to participate as it is about the process of purification of electoral rolls by removal of ineligible pollutants.

How democracy was protected by the exclusion of an approximate 59 lakh voters, by one reckoning, those who were not allowed to vote in the recent elections to West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam and Kerala, as well as the Puducherry Assembly elections, does not seem to perturb either the Supreme Court or the Election Commission or the elected Government of India and the elected governments in these states.

The sublime disregard for the rights of 59 lakh Indians may be less if there are non-Indians hiding within these numbers, to decide on who will represent them by the Supreme Court is an affront to the idea of democracy and the ownership of the republic and its Constitution by the people. If as the Supreme Court has said, “Free and fair elections do not rest merely upon the mechanics of polling… They equally depend upon the integrity, accuracy, and purity of the electoral roll, which forms part of the foundation of the democratic process,” then the exclusion is heinous and unlawful.

The SIR process, the apex court held, was for “restoration of accuracy, completeness, and integrity of the electoral rolls”. It does mean that all past elections have been on the basis of incomplete, compromised and inaccurate electoral rolls. It also means that the foundations of India’s democracy, rooted in the accuracy of the electoral rolls, has been, till now, shaky or weak. The EC, for the sake of transparency, must share the materials that led it to conclude in 2025 that the electoral rolls were not pure.

Until it does so, what voters are left with as a reason for the never-ending SIR and the disgraceful extension and intrusion of the EC into their private lives and fundamental rights, is a statement of December 10, 2025, by home minister Amit Shah in Parliament during the discussion on electoral reforms and the SIR, that it is the BJP government’s policy to “DETECT, DELETE, DEPORT” all ineligible voters, or “ghuspaithiyas”. As a constitutional body, an independent institution, the reasons of a ruling side’s policy cannot be the basis for its decisions that impact all of India’s voters. The voters’ list simply cannot be what defines who is an Indian, even though the Supreme Court has pretty much made it so.