Assam Is Out of the SIR. Here's What You Need to Know
Tamanna Naseer
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Bengaluru: As the Election Commission of India (ECI) mentioned on Monday (October 27) that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Assam will not begin on November 4 along with the “second phase” of the nationwide exercise, opposition parties and activists have raised questions about the timing and reasoning behind the ECI's decision.
Notably, the assembly elections in the state are scheduled next year. The current term of the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government will end in May, 2026.
The "second phase" of SIR – after the conclusion of the first phase in Bihar last month which faced criticism – will start from November 4 and the draft roll will be published on December 9. The final electoral rolls will be published on February 7, 2026.
What did the ECI say
On October 27, the ECI announced that the SIR will be conducted in Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep.
In response to a question on Assam during the question-answer session, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar underlined that the poll body has decided to exclude Assam as "the checking of citizenship in Assam is about to be completed".
“Under India’s Citizenship Act, there are separate provisions for Assam. Secondly, under the supervision of the Supreme Court, the checking of citizenship in Assam is about to be completed. The June 24 SIR order was for the whole country. This is not applicable to Assam. For this reason, separate orders for revision will be issued for Assam,” Kumar said, referring to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in the state.
What are the opposition leaders saying
Leader of the opposition in Assam legislative assembly and Congress legislator Debabrata Saikia criticised the commission’s decision underlining that the NRC process is "far from being concluded".
“The NRC process is far from being concluded. Once the Registrar General of India (RGI) notifies it, the process of claims for inclusion among those who have been rejected is supposed to take place, which is not even initiated. So, it is hard to understand their reasoning. The EC has proved itself to be an agent of the ruling party through the 2023 delimitation process by compressing minority voters into 22 highly populated constituencies,” Saikia said.
Slamming the ECI, DMK spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai questioned if the poll body has turned into a "citizenship-finding unit". Further, he asked how many illegal immigrants they were "able to find in Bihar".
“What has the ECI learnt from its experience in Bihar and how does it implement those findings in these 12 states? Why has Assam been left out of this SIR? When did SIR become a citizenship exercise? Why is ECI trying to bring in the criteria of citizenship? Is ECI a citizenship-finding unit? If so, how many illegal immigrants were they able to find out in Bihar? There are several unanswered questions. In Bihar, 65 lakh voters have been pushed out, they were disenfranchised by the ECI because of their reluctance to accept certain documents. Why have they excluded the other documents? Ration Cards, MGNREGA and others which were so long good?” Annadurai said, slamming the ECI.
The Bihar SIR has faced criticism for its non-inclusive list of documents risking disenfranchisement of voters, and ushering the NRC – a process of ostensibly detecting undocumented migrants in the state – through the backdoor.
The CAA-NRC exercise in Assam
Every person born in India on or after January 26, 1950 but before July 1, 1987 is a citizen by birth irrespective of the nationality of his/her parents.
Section 6A of the Citizenship Act was introduced in 1985 as a direct outcome of the Assam Accord, an agreement between the Indian government and Assamese nationalist leaders who had spearheaded a six-year movement against what they termed “illegal immigration” from Bangladesh. The accord set March 25, 1971, as the cut-off date for citizenship in Assam, effectively excluding migrants who entered the state after that date from eligibility for Indian citizenship.
However, in 2019, the Narendra Modi government enacted the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which radically altered the terms of granting citizenship, offering a fast-track route to citizenship for undocumented non-Muslims, i.e., Hindu, Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and Christian migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, provided they had entered India before December 31, 2014. The exclusion of Muslim migrants from the purview of the law sparked widespread controversy and protests across the country. Recently, the cut-off date for entry under the CAA is extended to December 31, 2024.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.
On August 31 2019, the final NRC – that was undertaken between 2015 and 2019 and closely monitored by the Supreme Court – left out 19 lakh out of 3.3 crore applicants in the state. Notably, five lakh Bengali Hindus, two lakh Assamese Hindu groups Koch-Rajbongshi, Das, Kalita and Sarma (Assamese), and 1.5 lakh Gorkhas were excluded from the register, as per Assam chief minister Sarma.
Now, due to the BJP’s issues with the NRC, the process remains incomplete as the Centre is yet to notify the list that sparked massive protests. "Three lakh to six lakh of those excluded from the register could apply for citizenship under the CAA," Sarma had said in an interview in March last year, in an obvious reference to the non-Muslims excluded from the NRC.
What's the BJP's position?
The BJP-led state government in the state has maintained that it does not find the 2019 NRC list acceptable in its current form, alleging that it excluded many indigenous residents while wrongly including a large number of "foreigners". Further, the BJP also claims that the actual number of people who entered Assam illegally after March 24, 1971, the NRC's cut-off date, is significantly higher than the 19 lakh names left out of the final list.
Both the Union and the state government had sought a reverification of the NRC data even before the list was finalised in 2019. However, the Supreme Court rejected the request underlining that NRC coordinator Prateek Hajela had already carried out 27% reverification during the claims and objections phase, and the court saw no need for further review.
Despite this, chief minister Sarma, during a special Assembly session this June, said the state government is in the process of seeking a 20% re-verification of entries in districts bordering Bangladesh and 10% in other districts.
Before the ECI's press conference on Monday, Assam chief minister Sarma said his government will welcome the ECI's move to carry out a SIR in the state. Similarly, after the ECI's announcement, BJP spokesperson Rupam Goswami said the party welcomes the SIR “whenever the EC is ready to hold it in Assam.”
However, as per a report published in The Indian Express in July, officials from Assam have told the ECI that the state’s exercise of preparing the NRC should be taken into account while setting timelines and deciding eligibility documents for the upcoming SIR of electoral rolls.
Assam government sources reportedly said that since the EC’s voter roll revision process also involves verifying citizenship to determine eligibility the NRC, once published, can serve as one of the admissible documents for the SIR.
In another report published in IE yesterday, a state election commission official was quoted as saying that pre-SIR activities such as mapping and locating voters in previous voter lists had started in the state as there's no clarity. “We have been preparing while assuming that the SIR will begin in Assam along with other states going to polls next year. Since the EC has not indicated the timeline for Assam, we will continue with the preparations and wait for the notification,” the official told IE.
Also read: Assam's History of Exploitation and the Movements That Emerged
While the 2019 NRC list faced criticism from both the opposition and the BJP, the challenge now lies in how the state administration navigates the complex process this time. The ECI’s decision to delay the voter roll revision until the NRC process is finalised has raised more questions than it has answered such as – Will the commission listen to the pleas of those citizens wrongfully left out from the list? Will the commission wait for those excluded from the NRC to obtain citizenship under the CAA? And will the NRC be treated as a valid document for inclusion in the electoral rolls?
Two states, two stances re citizenship
It is possible that any SIR in the state before the state elections, with citizenship being deeply contested and pressure being on Bengali-speakers, may change the debate in Assam and West Bengal and also for the ruling BJP, in power in Assam and Delhi and battling for power in West Bengal. The party has been making a case for Hindu Bengali-speakers to be designated citizens in West Bengal, but in Assam when the CAA-NRC issue arose in 2019-2020, the BJP had to face massive protests.
The BJP has been calling for naturalising non-Muslims as citizens, fast-tracking their citizenship, but in Assam this is a hot potato. SIR here at the time of the state assembly elections in both Assam and West Bengal is likely to raise all those issues all over again and make it tough for the BJP’s campaign points.
For now, the ECI’s move has amplified criticism that voter roll revisions are being entangled with the politics of citizenship, raising fresh doubts about the credibility of the SIR process.
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