Purifying The Roll, Recomposing The Demos: The Constitutional Architecture Of The Special Intensive Revision Of Electoral Rolls In India
Taranjot SinghOct 15, 202610.5281/zenodo.23401893pp. 586–60722 pages
From June 2025 the Election Commission of India extended a “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR) of electoral rolls from Bihar to almost every State and Union Territory, requiring enrolled electors to re-establish eligibility through fresh enumeration and, if unlinked to an earlier intensively revised roll, documentary proof. In Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India (2026), the Supreme Court upheld the exercise as traceable to Article 324 of the Constitution read with section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, found it proportionate, and recognised a “limited enquiry” into citizenship confined to electoral consequences. This article argues that the judgment settles the question of power but leaves three problems unresolved. First, by treating entries made through summary revisions as carrying only a rebuttable presumption, it relocates the burden of proving eligibility onto enrolled electors in a manner difficult to reconcile with Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer (1995). Second, its proportionality review was largely retrospective: the safeguards that sustained the exercise were judicially supplied mid-stream, and the Bihar election was completed before adjudication, exposing a gap between roll revision and the finality Article 329(b) attaches to elections. Third, the open-textured phrase “in such manner as it may think fit” has enabled procedural law-making by administrative order and software, as the 2026 dispute over the Form 6 declaration illustrates. The article proposes statutory codification of special revision, a minimum pre-election interval, individualised deletion procedures, cohort-sensitive documentation, and a statutory purpose limitation on SIR data.