The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to entertain an application seeking to prohibit the use of the Aadhaar card for voter identity verification during the ongoing SIR drive.
The court asked the petitioner, Ashwini Upadhyaya, to approach the Centre with his complaint that fake Aadhaar cards were being issued to Bangladeshis and Rohingya immigrants in the border states, particularly Bengal.
The court asserted that as long as the Aadhaar remained a valid document for proving a person’s identity under Section 23 of the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1950, it cannot be excluded from the SIR. The court, however, made it clear that the Aadhaar cannot be furnished as proof of citizenship.
“If Aadhaar is fraudulently procured on an industrial scale, it has to be statutorily regulated. The solicitor-general of India is present here. You (petitioner) make a representation to the Union government to amend the RPA. This cannot be a discussion before our forum always. If you say Aadhaar had been fraudulently procured on an industrial scale, then it requires to be statutorily regulated,” a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M. Pancholi told Upadhyaya.
The bench made the oral observation after Upadhyaya opposed the court’s reiteration of its September 2025 direction, in its order on Tuesday relating to the Bengal SIR, that the Aadhaar card be accepted as proof of identity during the SIR verification process.
The petitioner submitted that Aadhaar should not be considered by poll officials as several hundred Bangladeshis and Rohingya Muslims who had been caught by police for illegally entering India had been found to be in possession of fake Aadhaar cards issued by the authorities in Bengal.