Bihar SIR: Election Commission Asks Political Parties to Help Locate 74 Lakh Names

'This is a complete failure of the Election Commission of India, where they're just shrugging off their constitutional responsibilities,' Congress's Rahul Bal said.

Pavan Korada

'This is a complete failure of the Election Commission of India, where they're just shrugging off their constitutional responsibilities,' Congress's Rahul Bal said.

bihar sir election commission asks political parties to help locate 74 lakh names

Representative image. An image of the Bihar SIR uploaded by the Election Commission. Photo: X/@ECISVEEP.

New Delhi: The Election Commission of India announced in a press release on July 21 that it has asked political parties in Bihar to help locate nearly 74 lakh voters who are at risk of being excluded from the state’s electoral rolls, with just four days remaining before the July 25 deadline for its massive re-verification drive.

The move comes as the Commission’s own data shows that its field officers have been unable to find 43.93 lakh electors at their listed addresses. This figure marks an increase of more than 7 lakh people in the last three days alone.

The ECI's decision to enlist political parties in the final hours of its "Special Intensive Revision" (SIR) has drawn sharp criticism.

"This is a complete failure of the Election Commission of India, where they're just shrugging off their constitutional responsibilities," said Rahul Bal, an AICC member and national coordinator of the Congress party's data analytics department.

In a conversation with The Wire, Bal called the task "mathematically impossible" to complete genuinely and predicted it would result in flawed data. "Does any political party in India have that kind of infrastructure, including BJP?" he asked. "So what will they do? They'll give fake things. And under pressure, there is a high chance ECI will acknowledge those things."

The situation on the ground comes as the ECI is also defending the legality of its process in the Supreme Court. In an affidavit filed in response to petitions challenging the SIR, the Commission stated that the Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) cannot be treated as proof of eligibility for inclusion in the roll. It argued that since the SIR is a "de novo," or entirely fresh revision, the Voter ID, which is based on prior rolls, is insufficient.

The affidavit also noted that Aadhaar is not a valid proof of citizenship.

The Commission's legal position on citizenship proof, however, stands in contrast to its own list of 11 approved documents for the exercise, which includes items like a school certificate—itself not a statutory proof of Indian citizenship.

Bal argued that by involving political entities in its primary verification work, the Commission was compromising the neutrality of the electoral process. "They are killing the basic tenets of democracy," he stated. "The basic principle is that the voter role should be neutrally corrected and neutrally judged."

This article went live on July twenty-second, two thousand twenty five, at forty-four minutes past eight in the morning.

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