'It Breathes Life Into Democratic Process’; Supreme Court On Upholding Validity Of SIR

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:02]The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the validity of the special intensive revision or SIR conducted by the Election Commission of India.

[00:00:11]The court ruled that the exercise furthered the constitutional imperative of free and fair elections and that the poll panel's measures were legitimate, proportionate, and accompanied by adequate procedural safeguards.

[00:00:24]A bench comprising Chief Justice Sudhakant and Justice Joymal Bagchi held that the SIR undertaken under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act was neither contrary to the statutory framework governing electoral rolls nor an impermissible assumption of citizenship education powers by the Election Commission. Reading out the operative portion of the judgment, CJI Khan said that the SIR was initiated because substantial changes in the electoral rolls had occurred on account of demographic variations, urbanization, and large-scale migration and was aimed at safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process and ensuring free and fair elections. The court also said that the ECI was empowered to undertake such a special exercise and that the revision breathes life into the constitutional mandate under Article 324 within the precise statutory contours provided by the Section 21(3). Rejecting the principal challenge mounted by the petitioners, the court ruled that SIR exercise did not supplant the existing statutory framework under the Representation of the People Act. The petitioners argued that the timing and scale of the exercise undertaken ahead of assembly elections in multiple states resulted in large-scale disenfranchisement and effectively converted the ECI into a citizenship verification authority without statutory backing. The judgment assumes major constitutional and political significance because assembly elections in several states including West Bengal's have been conducted based on device electoral rolls prepared following the SIR. By the time West Bengal voted in April this year over 9.1 million names amounting to around 11.88% of the state's pre-revision electorate had been deleted from the rolls pursuant to the exercise according to the data placed before the court. The SIR first initiated in Bihar through a June 24, 2025 notification required voters not traceable to the 2002 or 2003 electoral rolls to furnish documentary proof linking them to persons present in the legacy rolls. The commission had initially prescribed 11 categories of acceptable documents before the Supreme Court directed the inclusion of Aadhaar during interim proceedings.

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