The Election Commission of India is inverting precept and practice to pass the burden of proving citizenship to the voter instead of the authorities having to prove why they have excluded someone based on fake citizenship, 93 former bureaucrats have written in an open letter slamming the poll panel’s special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar.

The former bureaucrats called the Election Commission’s move an assault on democracy that would disenfranchise a huge segment of the voting population, mostly those who possess little or no documentation as proof of citizenship.

The retired officers are from the three all-India and various Union government services who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group.

They wrote that continuing the "futile" SIR of the voter rolls in Bihar and extending the exercise to the rest of the country "poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced".

The letter said: "We are writing to express our alarm at what appears to be an assault on the very foundations of our democracy -- the system of universal adult suffrage -- the citizen's right to vote.

“The assault is an insidious one where the purported attempt to clean up and sanitise the electoral rolls is likely to end up disenfranchising a very large segment of the voting population, particularly the poor and the marginalised, who possess little or no official documentation as proof of their citizenship,” they added.

"So far, a liberal and flexible approach to documentary corroboration of citizenship was followed in the preparation of electoral rolls knowing full well that most Indians lack adequate documents and certificates to establish their citizenship status,” they said.

“It was also recognised that the poor are especially deprived in their access to official documentation resources and therefore need proactive measures to ensure their inclusion. This process has now been reversed to ensure that those with poor access to documents will be deprived of their rights as voters.”

The letter said the Election Commission has inverted long-standing precedent by putting the onus on the elector to prove their citizenship.

The poll panel, they said, has effectively given itself the authority to confer or take away citizenship rights without a constitutional mandate to do so.

The Election Commission, they said, has conferred "extraordinary discretionary powers" to officials "to indulge in rent seeking to remove or add voters".

"The continuation of this futile exercise and its proposed extension to the rest of the country, especially when all that is required is routine updation of existing data in the regular course of the EC's scheduled activities, poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced, from the very institution that is meant to uphold the system of universal suffrage," the letter said.

"As if it was not enough to commission an SIR which was capable of subverting the electoral process in the garb of reforming it, the breakneck speed with which it has been implemented, the impossible timelines given to the booth level officers (BLOs), the grossly inadequate infrastructure provided or made available to digitise the data has made a mockery of the very elaborate procedures the ECI has laid down," it read.