A democracy is judged not only by how it votes but also by who gets to vote. That question has returned to the centre of a national debate with the launch of the nationwide Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The electoral roll is the foundation of electoral legitimacy. If names go missing unfairly or voters are deleted without notice, democracy is diminished before a single vote is cast. There is a critical difference between cleaning the roll and cleansing the electorate. One strengthens democracy; the other undermines it.
The ongoing litigation concerning the SIR in Bihar where assembly elections begin on November 6 has shown how a necessary administrative exercise can escalate into a democratic concern. According to figures reported in affidavits before the Supreme Court, nearly 65 lakh (eventually 68 lakh) voters were deleted during the SIR in the state. While some deletions are expected — on account of deaths or permanent migrations — the figure of 68 lakh represents approximately 8.5% of Bihar’s eight crore electorate, a rate that requires transparent justification.
The Election Commission of India has maintained that due process was followed and that every deletion was made strictly as per law. However, hundreds of voters who approached the court and the press stated that they were never informed that their names had been removed. At the end of the rushed exercise, the EC claimed that not a single appeal had been filed against deletions and, therefore, the process should be presumed fair. But this argument reverses cause and effect. Voters cannot appeal deletions they are unaware of. The right to appeal exists only in theory; if the voter never receives notice of deletion, he/she cannot proceed to appeal.
Will the SIR have an electoral impact in Bihar? The answer is not speculative — it already has. In Bihar’s electoral history, many seats have been won or lost by wafer-thin margins. In the 2020 assembly elections, 113 seats were decided by fewer than 3,000 votes. Of these, 28 had margins of less than 1,000 votes. In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, several constituencies saw margins under 10,000 votes. If just two or three thousand legitimate voters are wrongfully removed from the roll in a constituency, it could tilt the outcome. A defective roll is not a clerical issue — it is a democratic injury. Once an election has been conducted on the basis of a flawed roll, its legitimacy is damaged. Courts cannot meaningfully repair such damage afterward.
We have always proudly proclaimed the fact that despite nearly a billion voters, the EC does not leave out a single voter. The single-voter booth in the Gir forest of Gujarat comes to mind at once which even Prime Minister Narendra Modi proudly mentioned in his Mann ki Baat broadcast a couple of years ago.
What did the Bihar SIR reveal about the state of Indian democracy? It revealed, first, that procedure must not be a bureaucratic ritual: it is the very instrument by which democracy must protect the weak. Rule 20 of the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 requires that every voter whose name is proposed for deletion must receive written notice and an opportunity to be heard. Yet, in Bihar, many voters were marked “shifted” or “duplicate” without any record that notice had been served. Interestingly, the activist, Yogendra Yadav, presented two individuals before the Supreme Court who were still alive but had been shown as dead in the draft rolls — a troubling indication of verification failures. Poor and migrant voters, who are often away for work, appear to have been disproportionately affected. In many cases, they were not contacted even once before deletion. If this is allowed to be repeated nationwide, India risks turning millions of voters into silent casualties of bureaucratic zeal.
Second, the Bihar experience revealed the danger of an over-mechanical approach to verification. Numerous field reports alleged that booth level officers had filled verification forms on behalf of voters without meeting them, that house-to-house verification was replaced by desk verification, and that BLO remarks were sometimes stamped without evidence. If true even in part, this is deeply disturbing. However, to be fair to the EC, the vigilance that booth-level agents exercised needs to be analysed.
Third, the controversy over acceptable documents — especially Aadhaar — highlighted the confusion between identity and citizenship. The EC initially excluded Aadhaar from the list of valid documents for SIR verification. This was puzzling as Aadhaar is the only government-issued ID held by the vast majority of ordinary voters, especially the poor. Only after judicial intervention was Aadhaar accepted as valid proof of identity. However, it must also be equally emphasised, as the EC has rightly done, that Aadhaar is proof of identity; it is not proof of citizenship. At the end of it all, it is important to know which documents were provided by the electors of Bihar. There is another unanswered question: how many foreigners were detected — the reason for this big, disruptive exercise?
What must the rest of India learn from Bihar as the SIR expands nationwide? First, notice must be real — not a ritual. Rule 20 must be implemented in letter and spirit. Notices must not lie forgotten on government notice boards. They must be delivered directly to voters using all available channels.
Second, every deletion must have a documented, verifiable reason. Deleting a voter is a grave act. Entries marked “shifted” or “duplicate” must be backed by evidence — not assumptions. Each deletion should create an audit trail: who verified it, what evidence was used, whether notice was served, and whether the voter was heard.
Third, the SIR must not become Special Intensive Removal. The purpose of revision is accuracy — not contraction. Deletion alone is not a measure of success. A balanced roll must show new enrolments, corrections, restorations, and deletions.
Fourth, grievance redressal must be real and accessible. Appeals against wrongful deletion must be simple and free. No citizen should be asked to travel 50 km or stand in queues for days to restore a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
Beyond these specific corrections lies a deeper question: what kind of democracy does India want to be? A democracy that counts voters as obstacles to be filtered out, or one that counts them as citizens to be included? The choice before the EC today is historic. It can rise to the occasion — as it has done many times before — or risk being reduced to a crisis manager in courtrooms.
Let us be clear: democracy does not collapse by coups alone. It collapses also by a thousand tiny exclusions. When names quietly disappear from rolls, democracy silently disappears from people’s lives. Let no Indian arrive at a polling station to find that his/her identity has been erased. Let no citizen be made to feel like a foreigner in his/her own democracy.
India is the world’s largest democracy. Let us ensure it remains the world’s fairest.
S.Y. Quraishi is former Chief Election Commissioner of India and the author of several books on democracy, the latest being Democracy’s Heartland: Inside the Battle for Power in South Asia