The People’s Union for Civil Liberties(PUCL) has filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging “arbitrary and unlawful” action by the Election Commission of India (ECI) in directing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the entire country. This action of the Commission is being enforced immediately in Bihar, months before the scheduled assembly elections.
”The PUCL’s constitutional challenge to the SIR is based on the argument that ”the impugned SIR process represented a direct assault on India’s constitutional democracy, violating the grundnorm of popular sovereignty enshrined in ‘We, The People’.”
“By abandoning statutory house-to-house surveys for arbitrary document-centred exclusions, creating impossible timelines, and systematically disenfranchising marginalised communities, the Election Commission has perverted the constitutional mandate, and inverted the principle of inclusion to that of exclusion”, PUCL President Kavita Srivastava said while detailing submission in the petition.
”The SIR process has within it conceptual and procedural chaos which violates Articles 14, 19, and 21, transforming universal adult suffrage from a fundamental right into a privilege contingent on bureaucratic compliance by so called unverified “volunteers” who have been converted into data processors,” she claimed.
“The process undermines democracy’s foundational principle that legitimate governance derives from the consent of all citizens, not just those who can navigate exclusionary administrative mazes. An illegal exercise, also hastily conducted to cover a population of almost 8 Crore, is likely to result in exclusion of voters and thereby defeat democracy using the very tools of democracy,” the PUCL leader said, quoting from the petition.
PUCL contended in the petition that Bihar has a massive migrant population, which works across India but returns home to exercise their democratic rights, and they face systematic exclusion through this malicious SIR process. ”Migrant workers lack local address proofs, cannot navigate complex form-based procedures from distant locations, and miss compressed timelines due to work commitments. This timing appears deliberately calculated to disenfranchise Bihar’s mobile workforce during crucial electoral periods.”
”The process exhibits legal malice by creating insurmountable barriers for citizens whose only ‘fault” is economic migration, violating constitutional equality and universal suffrage principles. SIR appears to be an exercise that is designed to exclude – using new tools of gerrymandering and administrative powers,” Srivastava observed.
The petition further said, ”A central dimension of our electoral democracy is universal adult suffrage, and the constitutional and statutory scheme vests responsibility on the Election Commission to ensure that every citizen can exercise their vote. It is this constitutional responsibility that the EC forsakes through the ill-advised SIR.”
Based on the above arguments, the PUCL argued that the EC Order and letter dated June 24, 2025, deserved to be quashed for being manifestly arbitrary.
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