Sanchari Bhattacharjee and Akiba Sardar
In the Indian subcontinent, religious mobilization for political ends has a lengthy and problematic history, ranging from electoral bloc consolidation to intercommunal bloodshed. In India, citizenship is defined under Article 5 of the Constitution. A bare reading of the text, may at first glance, depict a broad and all-encompassing definition, yet, in the more recent decades, there seems to have been a problem- immigration. In recent decades, political theorists have engaged in heated discussions about the rights that new members of a political community, like immigrants, acquire as well as whether it is a state’s right to admit immigrants without necessarily granting them citizenship rights.
In practice, since independence, the concept and experience of citizenship in India have historically developed through legislative regimes and administrative actions associated with the electoral roll revision, which is to say organizing the electoral roll, which is important to enable real political citizenship. The voting rights defined in the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the provisions in our Constitution outlined in Articles 326 and 327 set the basis for citizen voter rights as well as codify the state’s responsibility for the accurate and clear maintenance of those voter lists, most recently highlighted by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of 2025, which revealed tensions between legally- recognized citizenry, the potential for disenfranchisement, and the issue we call “vote chori”.
These modern developments reflect the worries expressed by political theorists about deficiencies in the actual implementation of rights, primarily in relation to immigrants and other disadvantaged groups who may be formally entitled to rights but face commonplace administrative and political barriers.
Historical Context and Legal Framework
Electoral roll revisions have been characterized mostly by the Representation of the People Act, 1950, since Independence and these revisions have been supervised by the Election Commission of India (ECI) under its constitutional authority under Article 324. The Constitution provides for the right to vote for all adult citizens in Articles 326 and 327, which makes maintaining accurate and fair lists of voters essential.
Revisions exist to encompass the new eligible voters (eighteen-year-olds) to correct errors in the voters’ particulars and to delete names of ineligible voters, including the deceased, duplicates, or voters who have moved out of the electoral district. Historically, revisions were routinely made as summary revisions before elections, with the more extensive process of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) practiced on an ad hoc basis, particularly when the electoral rolls became significantly new or suspected inaccurate.
The 2025 SIR has particular importance because it is the ninth full revision since Independence, and the first in the last two decades or so since the previous full SIR in the early 2000s. Rapid urbanization, migration and demographic changes in India has brought significant increases in voter rolls, and the manifestations of errors, duplicates and ineligible voters.
Systematic Identification and Review (SIR) is a verification process which is time-bound and door-to-door. It involves Booth Level Officers (BLOs) visiting households to carry out the verification, using Enumeration Forms which have been automatically pre-filled and established from data collected in the past since 2003. The data has allowed for verification or objection where needed. This process helps to cleanse the rolls, while also setting out to protect innocent voters from wrongful disenfranchisement in having a transparent objection process. The re-presentation of the current SIR exercise in 2025 covers multiple states and Union Territories where over 51 crore voters will be affected or included in the exercise, which is designed to conclude with the delivery and publication of accurate final rolls for the upcoming elections.
The 2025 Special Intensive Revision (SIR)
The SIR comprises 12 states and several Union Territories that hold political significance, including Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. The door-to-door verification will occur from early November through early December 2025. After the verification, draft electoral rolls will be released in early December, followed by a period for claims and objections from the public, while those claims are addressed to ultimately, produce final electoral rolls in early February 2026.
Booth Level Officers (BLOs) go door-to-door to verify and update the details of voters. A Unique Enumeration Form (UEF) is already filled out for each voter based on the last major revision (2002-2004). Voters confirm or update their information on the UEF, which lessens the burden of verification and documentation. This assists in getting voters to provide accurate information while making it easier for citizens to update details as part of the revision process.
Although Aadhaar (the biometric identification system) is widely accepted as proof of identity for verification purposes, it is explicitly not used to establish citizenship or domicile during the SIR. This distinction protects against the wrongful denial of voters with legitimate credentials, and complies with the legal standard that separates proof of identity from proof of citizenship.
Political and Social Controversies
The revision of the electoral rolls in India in 2025 unfolded in a chaotic backdrop of political scandal and public outrage, driven by the event that came to be called “vote chori” (vote theft). The central element of this reality show was the unearthing of a dastardly and systematic plan to improperly delete thousands of real voters from Karnataka’s Aland constituency, mainly poor voters from Dalits and minorities.
Investigations have shown that a clandestine data entry group was running an internet close, or cyber center in Kalaburagi district, allegedly being paid Rs 80 for each voter deletion, which they claimed to have totalled approximately Rs 4.8 lakh. The operatives conducted voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) calls and submitted falsified documents requesting thousands of deletions through the website of the Election Commission, between December 2022 and February 2023. The deletions occurred often in the dead of night with extreme efficiency. In one instance, two names were deleted in under 36 seconds, directly into the early hours of the morning.
This “industrial-scale” deletion activity was not simply an inadvertent action, somehow triggered, but preliminary findings suggest it was programmed centrally, using a software application that then enabled the operation to systematically delete targeted voters, disclosing weaknesses in the management of electoral data.
There was an immediate and dramatic political fallout. Opposition figures, especially Rahul Gandhi, capitalized on the scandal as it provided “undeniable proof” of organized fraud in the election process, alleging collusion or at least negligence by the ruling BJP and the Election Commission. Gandhi’s assertion that thousands of votes had been deleted by the Election Commission in order to help the BJP win the 2023 Karnataka Assembly election echoed across the country and inspired “vote chori” movements in places such as Bihar where the ongoing SIR exercise had deleted over 65 lakhs voters, or several million votes, with numerous allegations of unethical conduct such as deleting votes and disenfranchising voters. The Commission of Election, while stressing on the technical safeguards and legal protections regarding voter deletions, was met with strong criticism and scepticism about whether it acted in an optimal manner. Investigations revealed that deletion inquiries began only after receiving formal complaints from opposition members, which raised questions about the impartiality of the Commission of Election. National laws were enforced during the Special Investigation Team (SIT) raids, which targeted data operators and essential buildings involved and seized electronic devices for forensics. However, the Commission of Election argued that there were verified safeguards in place, as well as public hearings to protect voters’ rights, and added the vulnerable matters that were vetted for deletion were very few, less than five percent, since they were reviewed for submission.
Not only did the controversy reveal systemic inefficiencies in India’s voter management structure, but it also sparked vigorous debate on the intersections of citizenship, electoral fairness, and political power. The scandal demonstrated how fragile democratic processes can be when they can be compromised due to administrative negligence, and also amplified fears of unnoticed disenfranchisement among marginalized segments of society. By the time the SIR is widely implemented, the strength of trust in the system is already tenuous, which will require transparency, accountability, and a legal watch to safeguard the constitutional right to vote and the body of democratic citizenship in India.
Constitutional and Human Rights Perspectives
The integrity of electoral processes relies substantially on the non-negotiable status of the right to vote, which, in the Indian situation, is a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed to every individual as a citizen under Article 326 of the Constitution. This sets up the principle of universal adult suffrage so that the essence of democracy is participation, without discrimination based on caste, religion, or gender. However, the legal framework concerning eligibility to vote, which comes from the Representation of the People Act 1950, requires a narrow definition of legal citizenship and ordinary residence (Representation of the People Act, 1950). Hence, the emphasis on documented legitimacy conflicts with the realities of actual belongingness and contributes to a class of people who, particularly in marginalized communities, have been administratively excluded from the electoral rolls, denying them their intrinsic political autonomy. Therefore, the systematic removal of individuals from electoral rolls and removing individuals’ names, with or without error, is tantamount to both symbolic and literal acts of exclusion from the body politic.
On Tuesday, July 29, 93 retired officers from the three all-India and various Union government services joined the “Constitutional Conduct Group” and issued a warning, stating that the Election Commission’s (EC) SIR may disenfranchise “a very large segment” of Bihar’s voting population and that the poll body’s actions are bringing it into “grave disrepute”.
According to the former civil servants, the EC has reversed long-standing precedent by requiring voters to prove their citizenship, effectively granting itself the power to grant or revoke citizenship rights without a constitutional mandate, and granting officials “extraordinary discretionary powers” “to indulge in rent seeking to remove or add voters”.
These domestic failures are measured against rigorous international human rights standards for political participation. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts: “Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country” and that a government’s power must derive from the people’s consent via “universal and equal suffrage”. This idea is reinforced in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), Article 25, which guarantees every citizen the right to vote, without unreasonable restriction. This framework includes fundamental human rights principles related to equality, requiring states to ensure that differences based on status, origin, or other classifications do not impede the effective practice of political rights. Electoral processes that are non-transparent or unevenly applied violate the international obligation to ensure non-discrimination in public life. Any process that is biased in a systematic manner, regardless of whether it is intentional or structural, is a direct affront to the state’s obligation to equality before the law.
More importantly, the dangers of disenfranchisement are not only administrative mistakes; disenfranchisement can be a powerful tool of political exclusion. Systemic exclusion, often disguised as procedural constraints, works by taking away a democratic voice from certain groups, including religious minorities, or caste-system historically discriminated groups, who could vote against the political order. The viability of democracy is compromised not just by the blatant and widespread incidences of “vote chori” (electoral fraud) but also through the more fundamentally exploitative act of selecting a legal rationalization to transform citizenship obstacles into political exclusion obstacles. The weaponization of law in this manner serves to opaquely embed inequality, denying marginalised groups their right to full representation, reinforcing their lack of control of decisions directly impacting their lives.
Conclusion
The current debates regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and the “vote chori” controversy illustrate a significant ongoing gap in India’s democracy: the promise of the right to vote and its tenuous administrative promise. The concern lies within the administrative processes, such as the SIR, that subvert past precedent by shifting the burden of proof of citizenship to the elector, as the Constitutional Conduct Group has objected to sharply. This process weaponizes the bureaucracy, turning frequency of documentation to eliminate voters as a means of systematic political exclusion of the poor and migrants.
The big challenge is not just to prevent fraud, but to marry legal citizenship and lived belongingness. When the mechanisms of the state are perceived to systematically exclusionary as their purpose, they undermine the universally held and non-discriminatory standards held by international human rights law. Protecting the integrity of the electoral roll requires an immediate re-commitment to transparency, accountability, and the fundamental standard that the sovereign will of the people, expressed through universal suffrage, must ultimately rank supreme.
The authors are third year students of the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences.
Image Credits: Getty Images
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