By Abdullah Ghazali, Asif Iqbal, Madhav Anand
Last Week the Election Commission of India (ECI) directed a special drive to re-enrol voters who were left out of the process during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted in 30 States and Union Territories (UTs). Such directions came in the backdrop of the incessant criticism the ECI, headed by Gyanesh Kumar, faced over removal of 13 crore names from draft rolls in those States and UTs and a week after the devastating Indian Express expose (September 23) laid bare the squabbles between CEC and two Election Commissioners on several issues concerning SIR and who would be included in the voter list and who would be removed.
Conduct of free and fair elections, held by the Supreme Court as a basic structure of the Constitution, depends on the absolute neutrality of the Election Commission, and on the public’s trust in it. Tragically, public trust in ECI has been eroding at an accelerated pace over the last 12 years. Twenty-five years back on January 17, 2001 while inaugurating the golden jubilee celebrations of ECI then President of India K R Narayanan underlined the respect and admiration commanded by it and stated “In a public opinion poll it was found that people rated the Election Commission very high far ahead of the police, the bureaucracy, the political parties, the Central Government, local self-Government and even the judiciary.”
It is rather distressing that, two and a half decades later, and especially after the ECI operated the SIR, the Lokniti-CSDS survey recorded an alarming fall in the credibility of the Election Commission of India. The Hindu described the loss of trust as “unprecedented”, warning that it could fundamentally undermine the credibility of the electoral process. Therefore, it is salutary that the questions raised about the SIR’s implementation, including by civil society, must be addressed with a view to restoring the credibility of ECI. Two aspects of the SIR demand closer examination: the introduction of a new declaration in Form 6 without an amendment to the governing Rules, and the position of deleted voters whose appeals have barely progressed. Together, they ask whether the difficulties lie only in implementation or partly in its design.
Form 6, the application that every new voter must file to get enrolled in electoral roll, is prescribed by the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which the Central Government framed under Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The power to amend the rules, therefore, rests with the Central Government, not with the Commission. In Mohinder Singh Gill v Chief Election Commissioner (1978), the Supreme Court held that the Commission’s power under Article 324 operates in areas left unoccupied by legislation; where a law has been made, including rules framed under Parliament’s delegation, the Commission must act in conformity with it.
In July this year, the online version of Form 6 on the ECINet portal mandated fresh applicants to declare whether they, or their parent or their grandparent, had been included in the electoral roll at the last intensive revision. No corresponding amendment to the 1960 Rules was made, and both Election Commissioners, as revealed by the Indian Express expose, objected to the change, one describing it as “unauthorised and illegal”.
The Commission in a press note released on September 26 claimed that “The declaration attached to Form 6 for SIR has been upheld by the Hon’ble Supreme Court” The Court however, in its May 2026 judgement in ADR v ECI while holding SIR as constitutional did accept that Form 6 “may not, in all situations, be capable of literal application to an SIR”, and recognised a residual authority in the Commission to frame documentation for the purpose. But it added that “such authority, however, is not unbounded”. Proceeding further it remarked, “In devising such a framework, the Commission must remain cognisant of the existing statutory scheme, and any departure therefrom must be informed by a rational nexus to the object sought to be achieved,” The declaration the Court examined, moreover, was the ‘Annexure D declaration’ used in Bihar, which was different from the version now in use online and even the Supreme Court itself was at pains to clarify that it had approved no such modification.
In late September, after a meeting of the full Commission, the declaration was withdrawn where the SIR has concluded, and retained only where the revision is underway. The correction is welcome, but it leaves the underlying question open. Whether the version actually used, falls within the bounds the Court set is a question the Court has not yet considered, and if the declaration is to have any lasting place in the enrolment process, should that not be secured through an amendment to the Rules, rather than merely through a change to an online form?
In West Bengal, the appellate tribunals were constituted on 20 March, barely five weeks before the Assembly elections on 23 and 29 April. Since Section 23(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 bars any amendment, deletion or inclusion of entries after the last date for nominations until the election is completed, an appeal not decided by then could not, in effect, restore a voter’s name in time for polling.
As of mid-May, the tribunals had decided approximately 6,500 of nearly 25 lakh appeals, and the voter’s name was restored in about 61 per cent of cases. The small sample, if it is at all representative, indicates a substantial number of those who could not vote in April may have been entitled to do so. By September, the number of appeals had risen to 38.3 lakh, but more than 20 lakh of these were filed by the ECI itself, against names that judicial officers had already cleared during the adjudication phase. Of the 1.26 lakh appeals decided by then, 1.14 lakh resulted in inclusion; yet, with the ECI’s own appeals in the mix, these cannot be read straightforwardly as restorations of SIR-deleted voters.
The consequences of deletion have not remained confined to the roll. Since May, the West Bengal government has issued orders treating persons excluded in the SIR as ineligible for welfare benefits. In June, the Food and Supplies Department directed that the ration cards of electors marked absent, shifted, dead, or duplicate be rendered inactive, except for those with appeals pending before the tribunals or applications under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. By one estimate, between 35 and 60 lakh people risk losing their ration cards. This sits uneasily with the SIR judgment.
In ADR v ECI the Supreme Court held that the Commission’s enquiry yields only an “administrative satisfaction as to eligibility for enrolment”, whose consequence is “correspondingly limited”: it does not “divest the individual of claims of citizenship”. The exemption for pending appeals, though well-intended, compounds the difficulty. It protects those who were able to file an appeal and leaves exposed those who were not, who are often those with the fewest resources. For them, the loss of ‘voting rights’ and the loss of ‘right to food’ arrive together.
Welfare, moreover, rests on a different footing. Section 3(1) of the National Food Security Act, 2013 extends to “every person belonging to priority households”, without condition as to citizenship or enrolment, and the ‘right to food’ under Article 21 belongs to every person. An elector who has “shifted” has changed residence, not ceased to be in need.
The SIR judgment itself recognised that a process which “perceived as exclusionary” can be “rendered constitutionally compliant in execution” through appropriate safeguards. Whether those safeguards have operated is a question the experience of West Bengal leaves open. With the third phase of SIR underway, it may be worth asking whether lasting changes to Form 6 are better made through the Rules; whether appellate authority can match the scale of deletion so that appeals are decided before the rolls close; and whether, consistently with ADR v ECI, the consequences of deletion can be confined to the roll. The Court has upheld the legality of SIR. The confidence it commands will ultimately depend on how it treats those it may have excluded in error.
On July 17, 1924, Mahatma Gandhi wrote in Young India, that deleting the name of a voter from the voter list before the conduct of the election and restoring it after the completion of the election “is like sending a reprieve after hanging.” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume 24, Pages 407-408) He asserted that every vote mattered and remarked, “One vote is enough to turn the scales on”. He went on to add that the incident furnished him with “an additional cause for non-cooperation.” Hundred and two years after Gandhi articulated those prescient ideas, people are now in the streets in defence of their voting right and demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. So what safeguards are there to deal with mass disenfranchisement and provide relief to those struck off the electoral roll? If relief is provided by restoring their names in the voter list after completion of a cycle of election, then it would be, in the words of Gandhi, “sending a reprieve after hanging.” (IPA Service)
Courtesy: The Leaflet
