Revision of Electoral Rolls in Bihar| Day 16: SC asks petitioners to avoid directing“sweeping assertions” against the Election Commission

Singhvi: ‘Migration’ too vague to justify nation-wide SIR

Singhvi said that the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (RP) does not impose any burden on voters in the process of revising an annual and ever-changing electoral roll. He stressed that Parliament occupies this field under Article 327 of the Constitution and that the RP Act always functions at the constituency level. Further, the Act obliges the ECI to provide reasons for each constituency before ordering a special revision.

“Reasons under Section 21(3) are by nature individualised. They can never be one size fits all. That is the nucleus of my argument,” he said. He argued that the ECI cannot rely on themes such as “rapid urbanisation” or “frequent migration” because these broad descriptions do not tie to any constituency as Section 21(3) requires. Urbanisation has unfolded over many years, he said, and migration remains too vague to justify a statewide special revision.

He then connected Section 21(3) to Section 21(1) and the usage of the phrase “prescribed manner” in Rule 25 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 (1960 Rules). He said Section 21(1) leads directly to Rule 25 and that any intensive revision must comply with Rule 25. “Never before has anyone classified an entire state. Nobody in 75 years has thought of this brainchild,” he said. In his view, the ECI has stretched the RP Act beyond its limits and adopted a power that Parliament never contemplated.

Singhvi: SIR creates arbitrary classifications and imports a citizenship screen

Singhvi pointed out that the SIR divides post-2003 voters into three distinct groups and seeks different documents from each group. He argued that such a distinction lacks any relational link to a legitimate public interest and violates the equality doctrine under Article 14 of the Constitution.

He further submitted that ECI also introduced a citizenship screen outside its powers. Sections 8 and 9 of the Citizenship Act, 1955, vest the authority to determine citizenship in the Union Government, courts and Foreigners Tribunals. He said the ECI instructed Electoral Registration Officers to scrutinise citizenship-related documents, identify suspected non-citizens and report them. “The SIR turns the existing roll into a presumptive temporary list and shifts the burden to the voter,” he said. He said the State must carry the burden of proving non-citizenship, which the ECI cannot reverse through guidelines.

Kerala: Staffing and scheduling concerns

The Bench then turned to Kerala’s concerns. Notably, the reports have emerged from the state regarding manpower constraints due to simultaneous SIR and local body elections. Dwivedi informed the Court that the Kerala State Election Commission had deployed 1,76,000 workers and the State Government had assigned another 25,000 for local-body elections. The Court told the ECI not to call for any additional government staff.

The Kerala SEC said it had already exempted SIR personnel from local-body poll duties. The Court asked the State to place a formal request for extending the SIR enumeration timeline before the ECI by 5 pm tomorrow and told the ECI to give the request “sympathetic consideration” and take a decision by the following day.

Grover and Bhushan: Concerns on exclusion, form design and transparency

Grover argued that the enumeration form in the SIR exercise was designed to disadvantage women and other vulnerable groups. She pointed out that there was a sharp fall in women’s entries between January 20025 to the current draft electoral roll. She argued that the enumeration form adopted in the SIR exercise does not appear in the Rules. This, she argued, narrows the legislative procedure in the Rules without statutory authority.

Bhushan questioned the lack of transparency in the SIR process. He asked why the ECI expects political parties to convert voter data into machine-readable form when the ECI can release it in that format itself. On the citizenship issue, he said the ECI has told its officers that it is not their job to decide citizenship and that the “concerned authority” will look into it, yet the SIR process still pushes BLOs and EROs into that space.

Bhushan referred to a Reporters’ Collective analysis that identified more than 5 lakh duplicate entries even after the SIR and noted that the reporters created a machine-readable roll on their own.

When Bhushan warned that plenary powers could turn the ECI into “a despot,” CJI Surya Kant asked him to avoid “sweeping assertions” not found in the pleadings.

The Court will continue the hearing on 4 December.