The Supreme Court on Tuesday (Nov 11, 2025) questioned opposition parties, leaders and NGOs over their negative portrayal of electoral rolls by the Election Commission of India’s Special Intensive Review (SIR), including their claims that the exercise amounts to “citizenship verification” in disguise and threatens to disenfranchise lakhs.
“You people want to project as if the revision of electoral rolls is happening for the first time in this country! We also know the ground reality. A constitutional functionary is conducting the exercise… There may be some procedural flaws. These can be pointed out and corrected. You are saying as if the democratic process is compromised… There is already an electoral roll, this is just a process to revise it,” said Chief Justice Nadil Surya India-rudesignate Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party and leaders from West Bengal.
Also read | SC talks on SIR updates
Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are among the 12 states and union territories included in the second phase of the SIR exercise, announced on October 28. The fate of 51 million voters is at stake.
Bihar SIR: What the Supreme Court’s intervention has achieved and what lies ahead
Rushed process
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing the DMK along with senior advocate Amit Anand Tiwari and advocate Vivek Singh and some MPs from West Bengal, took up the challenge from the Bench and replied that electoral roll revisions had indeed taken place in the past, but pointed out that the process in these cases was painstaking and lengthy, taking almost three years.
“The Electoral Commission (EC) now wants to do it in a month. It already started on November 4… In the end, thousands of people will be excluded from the voter list,” he replied.
The Solicitor General said that only 61.43% (3.93 lakh) forms have been distributed so far in Tamil Nadu during the seven days of distribution till November 10. Of these, only a meager 4,713 forms were digitized. “If this is considered, millions of forms cannot be digitized before the date of publication of the draft voter list. So there is an imminent danger of millions of voters being disenfranchised,” argued Mr. Sibal.
The enumeration phase for SIR 2.0 will continue until December 4 and the EC will publish the draft voter lists on December 9. The final electoral rolls will be published on February 7, 2026.
An inexplicable list of documents
Mr. Sibal termed the current SIR a “farcical exercise” referring to the EC’s inexplicable inclusion of “Bihar SIR Voter Roll Extract with reference to July 1, 2025” in its list of 13 types of documents that could be produced as proof of identity during verification at SIRs in Tamil Nadu and three other Union states.
“As the 13th document, an extract from the voters list of Bihar SIR has been added. What Bihar SIR has to do with the Tamil Nadu elections has not been made clear. This has become a cause of confusion in the minds of voters as well as parties in Tamil Nadu and other states. Will Bihar SIR be considered as a basic document which would include voters of Tamilcriordina as voters of Tamilordina as voters residing in the latter state? Mr. Sibal asked the court.
The bench issued notice to the EC on the petitions filed by the DMK and other objections challenging the constitutionality of the SIR exercise.
They are competing for backwardness
Mr. Sibal noted that states differ from each other culturally and geographically. A senior lawyer pointed out that there were large parts of rural areas in Tamil Nadu with almost zero internet connectivity. “How would people upload documents and details if their names are not on the draft list or if their previous details do not match the enumeration forms or if their details are not available? They will have to fill everything in. But from where?” asked Mr. Sibal.
The Election Commission, represented by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, said states opposing SIR were “competing with each other to prove who is more backward”.
The need for transparency
Advocates Prashant Bhushan and Neha Rathi, appearing for the Association of Non-Governmental Organizations for Democratic Reforms (ADR), proposed an alternative measure to remove dead and duplicate voters from the electoral rolls.
Mr. Bhushan said the EC has deduplication software that can be run to identify duplicate names in the voters’ list. Similarly, gram sabhas or panchayat sabhas could be organized at the field level to identify voters who have migrated or are dead. The lawyer urged the court not to allow the European Commission to use the SIR as a mechanism to determine citizenship.
In the application, Mr. Bhushan insisted that the election officials must provide the voters with an acknowledgment of receipt while submitting the census forms. He said the electoral roll for 2003 should be made available in machine-readable form. “This is to help voters verify the presence of their parents, relatives or their own names in the 2003 rolls. It will ensure transparency,” Mr. Bhushan said.
Voter privacy concerns
While concurring with Mr. Bhushan on the corroboration point, Justice Joymalya Bagchi’s bench referred to a Supreme Court judgment that had objected to the publication of machine-readable voter lists as it may lead to a breach of voter privacy.
“Data can be mined. EC holds data in confidence,” Justice Bagchi observed.
In the hearing, Justice Bagchi also reiterated at one point that the court had only included Aadhaar as proof of identity in the SIR process. “We only said that if EC could use caste or birth certificates as proof of identity in SIR, Aadhaar could also be used,” Justice Bagchi clarified.
The court posted the case for hearing on November 26.
Published – 11 Nov 2025 21:09 IST
