Continuing SIR Would Pose Indian Democracy One of Its Biggest Threats Yet: Ex-Bureaucrats

New Delhi: Continuing the “futile” special intensive revision (SIR) of the voter rolls in Bihar and extending the exercise to the rest of the country “poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced”, a group of former civil servants has said in an open letter.

Joined under the banner of the ‘Constitutional Conduct Group’, 93 retired officers from the three all-India and various Union government services warned on Tuesday (July 29) that the Election Commission (EC)'s SIR may disenfranchise “a very large segment” of Bihar's voting population and the manner of its conduct is bringing the poll body into “grave disrepute”.

The ex-civil servants said the EC has inverted long-standing precedent by putting the onus on the elector to prove their citizenship, effectively given itself the authority to confer or take away citizenship rights without a constitutional mandate to do so, and conferred “extraordinary discretionary powers” to officials “to indulge in rent seeking to remove or add voters”.

Pointing to news reports and public testimonies suggesting irregularities in the conduct of the exercise, the group said that “evidence of such fraud in the very first stage of the SIR … vitiates the entire SIR process and undermines those very constitutional processes that the EC claims to be following”.

It added: “The continuation of this futile exercise and its proposed extension to the rest of the country, especially when all that is required is routine updation of existing data in the regular course of the EC’s scheduled activities, poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced, from the very institution that is meant to uphold the system of universal suffrage.”

Its statement has been reproduced in full at the end of this article.

Citing a number of reasons including rapid urbanisation, migration, inadequate reporting of deaths and the inclusion in voter rolls of undocumented immigrants, the EC last month announced it would carry out an SIR in the state, which is due for polls in October-November.

It completed the first, ‘enumeration’ stage of the SIR on July 25 amid an ongoing challenge in the Supreme Court, where petitioners have argued that the exercise risks disenfranchising swathes of the state's electors.

As part of the SIR the EC is using the 2003 voter roll – produced after the last such revision was held in Bihar – as reference, requiring those whose names do not feature in it to furnish, depending on when they were born, proof of their parents' birth and/or proof of their own birth.

Citizens can provide one of 11 documents as proof of birth, although the commonly kept Aadhaar, voter and ration cards are not among them, even as the Supreme Court has suggested that the poll body accept them.

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CCG Open Statement on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Electoral Rolls in Bihar

July 29, 2025

We are a group of former civil servants of the All India and Central Services who have worked in the Central and State Governments during our careers. As a group, we have no affiliation with any political party but believe in impartiality, neutrality and commitment to the Constitution of India.

2. We are writing today to express our alarm at what appears to be an assault on the very foundations of our democracy – the system of universal adult suffrage, i.e. the citizen’s right to vote. The assault is an insidious one where the purported attempt to clean up and sanitise the electoral rolls is likely to end up disenfranchising a very large segment of the voting population, particularly the poor and the marginalised, who possess little or no official documentation as proof of their citizenship.
3. For all the 73 years since the first General Elections were held, the vast majority of the poor in India have held their Right to Vote as their most fundamental stake in Indian democracy. Throughout, the principle followed has been that, unless anyone disputes their status, they are presumed to be citizens and. therefore, attempts should be made to ensure that everyone is included as a voter. In fact, in complete contrast to the manner in which the ‘new’ Election Commission of India (ECI) is functioning, the attempt in the past was to see that no adult Indian was left out of the enfranchisement process and the ECI took it as its solemn responsibility to include people residing in the remotest corners of the country as voters, however marginal their lives might be. The focus was on inclusion and not exclusion on account of alleged ineligibility.
4. So far, a liberal and flexible approach to documentary corroboration of citizenship was followed in the preparation of electoral rolls knowing full well that most Indians lack adequate documents and certificates to establish their citizenship status. It was also recognised that the poor are especially deprived in their access to official documentation resources and therefore need proactive measures to ensure their inclusion. This process has now been reversed to ensure that those with poor access to documents will be deprived of their rights as voters.
5. The ECI has exempted electors included in the 2003 electoral roll from furnishing any document under SIR 2025 other than “the relevant extracts of the said part showing their name in the 2003 electoral roll”. ECI’s affidavit states that the children of electors included in the 2003 rolls have also been allowed to use this avenue to prove their eligibility. Such privileging of the inclusions in the 2003 electoral rolls, over and above all electoral rolls published by the ECI in the two subsequent decades, is untenable, unjust and discriminatory.
6. The SIR is claimed to be an exercise in pursuit of the responsibility entrusted to the ECI under the Constitution, yet what it is effectively doing is to invert precept and practice to:

• pass the burden for proving citizenship to the voter instead of the authorities having to prove why they have excluded someone on the basis of fake citizenship;
• arrogate to itself (the ECI) the authority (instead of the Home Ministry) to effectively confer or take away citizenship rights without any Constitutional mandate to do so;
• introduce the contested idea of the NRC through the backdoor, as it were, in the guise of cleaning up electoral rolls;
• effectively negate and nullify the electoral rolls currently in use (as recently as in the 2024 Lok Sabha Elections) on the pretext that they are likely to be contaminated and, thereby , justify the creation of a completely new set of rolls;
• disenfranchise millions of those who have been registered voters in all elections held since 2003 but may not have documents that they are now required to possess;
• prescribe a list of documents through an arbitrary and whimsical executive fiat making it virtually impossible for most people to obtain them in time;
• use the pretext of cleaning and purifying voter lists to eliminate and delete millions of existing voters who cannot satisfy arbitrary bureaucratic requirements, e.g. married women having to produce birth certificates etc. of their parents;
• give extraordinary discretionary powers to officialdom at various levels to indulge in rent seeking to remove or add voters;
• muddy waters sufficiently to make the entire process mystifying, difficult and opaque.

7. As if it was not enough to commission an SIR which was capable of subverting the electoral process in the garb of reforming it, the breakneck speed with which it has been implemented, the impossible timelines given to the Booth Level Officers, the grossly inadequate infrastructure provided/made available to digitise the data has made a mockery of the very elaborate procedures the ECI has laid down .
8. In several reports in the print and electronic media, notably the YouTube videos of Ajit Anjum, a reputed journalist, it is abundantly clear that fraud and forgery on a massive scale has occurred. There is video evidence to show that voter forms have been filled up not by the voters but en masse by BLOs sitting in officially provided space, and signatures of thousands of those voters forged in an organised manner. Forms and signatures of family members of several voters (including forms of dead members of their families) have been filled, signed and uploaded on the ECI website without their knowledge and consent. When reports appeared that no one was being given the voter’s copy of the enrolment form nor any acknowledgement receipts provided, pictures were hastily taken to show village women lining up and holding their copy of forms as proof of acknowledgement. When the same women were visited again by the investigating reporter - Ajit Anjum - they confessed that the officials gave them the forms, took the photo of them holding them up, published them and then took back those forms.
9. In a Jansunwai (public hearing) held in Patna on 21.06.2025 with eminent persons like Wajahat Habibullah (former Chief Information Commissioner of India) and Justice Anjana Prakash (retired judge of the Patna High Court) among others as the Presidees, 25 persons, including several illiterate women, from 14 villages described their experiences of what actually happened during the SIR process, and their detailed testimonies showed the extent of the fraud that is being perpetrated in the name of the SIR. This is a shocking revelation of the way the Election Commission is using its powers, forcing the district machinery to resort to unethical practices in an organised manner in the very first phase of this elaborate charade. The evidence of such fraud in the very first stage of the SIR exercise vitiates the entire SIR process and undermines those very constitutional processes that the ECI claims to be following. It is especially reprehensible that this fraud is being committed under the direct supervision of the ECI, bringing this institution of eminence with a glorious past into grave disrepute. The continuation of this futile exercise and its proposed extension to the rest of the country, especially when all that is required is routine updation of existing data in the regular course of the ECI’s scheduled activities, poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced, from the very institution that is meant to uphold the system of universal suffrage.
10. As our various petitions and pleas to the ECI in several matters relating to elections have been ignored and casually dismissed in the past, we are addressing this open letter to ‘We the people’ so that public opinion is mobilised and there is pressure on the ECI to take corrective action. We also hope that the Supreme Court, which is examining the matter, takes heed of the issues raised by us, particularly as most of us, as members of the CCG, have had long experience of conducting and supervising elections, including the preparation of Electoral Rolls, and are familiar with the complexities of doing so in a vast democracy like ours.

SATYAMEVA JAYATE

Yours faithfully

Constitutional Conduct Group (93 signatories as indicated below)

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