A booth level officer inspects documents during a special investigative review of electoral rolls in Purnea, Bihar. File | Photo credit: The Hindu
Ahead of the first phase of Bihar elections on November 6, the Election Commission of India (ECI) was seen vehemently defending the Special Intensive Review (SIR) in the Supreme Court, even as petitioners disputed the election body’s claim that the current exercise is a spin-off from the 2003 “transparent” intensive review of the state’s electoral rolls.
The final list, released on September 30 at the end of the SIR, saw the deletion of 3.66 million names. Opposition parties questioned the SIR exercise and demanded that the ECI submit reasons for excluding these names.
But the ECI’s June 24 order said the SIR was conducted only after political parties raised concerns over inaccuracies in the voter list. It reasoned that the SIR was necessary due to mass migration, urbanization and ensuring that only citizens were registered to vote. The Commission justified the order that “the absence of any intensive review for nearly two decades has necessitated a more rigorous and fundamental exercise”.
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The electoral body said the SIR 2025 was merely a repeat of an exercise that was held regularly until 2003. The ECI used the 2003 electoral roll as “probable evidence of eligibility, including presumption of citizenship”. In fact, the ECI said that voters enrolled in the 2003 intensive revision need not attach any other documents along with their rolls, except for the extract from the roll. In a counter-affidavit before the apex court, the ECI even said that “such children who became eligible on the basis of adulthood after 2003 “would only have to prove their relationship to those voters whose names appear in the electoral roll in 2003”.
The last intensive review in Bihar was completed in 2003, with 1 January 2003 as the qualifying date. In its June 24 order, the ECI referred to the 2003 intensive review as a “precedent and template” for the 2025 SIR.
Interestingly, one of the petitioners, the Association for Democratic Reforms, represented by advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi, pointed out to the court that the ECI “never brought on record the original documents of the 2003 special review of an intensive nature which it considers to be a precedent and an interruption”.
Also read | Supreme Court tells Election Commission to be open about names in Bihar final lists
The Petitioner dug through the records of the 2003 roll revision to discover a 62-page document titled “Electoral Rolls of Special Revision of an Intensive Nature with Qualification Date 01.01.2003, Final Instructions” to find that the 2003 exercise was “fundamentally different” from the current 2025 exercise.
The petitioners pointed out five “fundamental differences” between the intensive revision of 2003 and SIR 2025. First, the burden of entering eligible names on the electoral rolls in 2003 was entirely on the enumerator (now called the booth-level officer) and not on the voter as in SIR 2025.
Second, voters had no census form and thus no deadline for potential voters to meet, as in SIR 2025. The census commissioner conducted a house-to-house survey to confirm, supplement, or amend the existing voter list in consultation with the head of the household or an older adult member of the family.
Also read | In the Bihar SIR challenge, the Supreme Court refers to a 1977 verdict on the powers of the Election Commission
Third, unlike SIR 2025, there was no general requirement in 2003 for all potential voters to provide at least one document.
In 2003, there was again no general mandate to verify the citizenship of every voter. The 2003 directives allowed citizenship inquiries only in the case of persons declared by the relevant courts to be “foreigners”.
Finally, the intensive review provisions of 2003, unlike SIR 2025, did not allow for the exclusion of any name from pre-existing lists without going through the proper name deletion process.
The Supreme Court held a hearing on the constitutionality of the Bihar SIR on November 4. Both Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi, who constituted the bench hearing the case, were part of the Constitution Bench and did not meet on Tuesday.
Published – 05 Nov 2025 18:47 IST
