The row over rolls revision: Great Bihar disenfranchisement

At a time when the ECI’s credibility and the trust in the sanctity of voter rolls are at an all-time low, its whimsical and arbitrary decision to undertake an SIR in Bihar has further eroded its trust and confidence.

Any Indian citizen, aged 18 years or older, and a legal resident anywhere in the country, has the right to vote. To be able to vote, one needs to enroll in the voter lists maintained by the Election Commission of India (ECI). During the constituent assembly debates in 1949, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar said that “sanctity of voter lists” was the “foundation of India’s democracy”. Alas, this foundation is now shaky, thanks to the ECI’s egregious behaviour.

The ECI has suddenly and unilaterally decided that for the upcoming state election in Bihar, every voter enrolled since 2003 is not a valid voter now. If a Bihari voted in last year’s Lok Sabha election, she or he is now not a legal voter by default and will have to re-enroll as a voter. To put it simply, she or he is disenfranchised automatically and will have to prove her or his credentials again. An estimated 4.8 crore (48 million) such adults in Bihar, equal to the population of Spain, are now guilty and non-voters until proven innocent and voters. Imagine an entire nation of Spain being told overnight that they are now stripped of their voting rights and have to re-register within a month to vote in an upcoming election! This is the Great Bihar Disenfranchisement.

Why did the ECI make this bizarre announcement suddenly and so close to the elections? It claims that the voter lists need to be cleaned and freed of duplications. This means that the ECI admits that the voter rolls currently are not clean, a fact that we have pointed out repeatedly since the Maharashtra 2024 state elections. More than 40 lakh new voters popped up suddenly in just five months for the Maharashtra 2024 state election, much more than the total new voters in Maharashtra enrolled in the full five years prior. Where did so many new voters suddenly emerge from? Who are they, and how were they enrolled? To check these, when the Leader of the Opposition, Rahul Gandhi, demanded the Maharashtra voter lists be made public, the ECI developed cold feet and instead announced a ‘Special Intensive Revision’ (SIR) for the Bihar state elections. How strange?

At a time when the ECI’s credibility and the trust in the sanctity of voter rolls are at an all-time low, the ECI’s whimsical and arbitrary decision to undertake an SIR in Bihar has further eroded its trust and confidence. In fact, on March 8, 2025, in response to the Congress’s allegations of dubious voter rolls, the ECI had mooted a proposal to use Aadhaar linking of voter rolls to clean up and de-duplicate. In the spirit of a constructive solution to strengthen India’s democracy, the Congress changed its earlier stand to welcome and support this move by the ECI to use Aadhaar, even though it is still an imperfect solution, but better than the options available. Then, in less than three months after the Aadhaar linking proposal, why did the ECI suddenly change its stand, drop the Aadhaar idea and announce SIR in Bihar? Were they instructed or nudged by their ‘bosses in Delhi’?

Even if the ECI was honest in its intent to clean up voter lists, did it really think that the equivalent of an entire nation of Spain could be visited house to house, re-enrolled as voters after scrutiny of documents in just a month? Why were political parties not consulted by the ECI before it announced this drastic disenfranchisement in Bihar? Further, why is the ECI asking all 35-year-olds and below in Bihar to submit their parent(s)’ birth certificate(s) too? Is all this just yet another cover for the ECI to create a curated list of voters that the ‘bosses in Delhi’ approve and can help them win the election like they did in Maharashtra? Why should the Opposition parties then legitimise this farce called an election by participating in it?

Praveen Chakravarty

(The writer is the Chairman of the Data Analytics and Professionals’ Congress departments of the Indian National Congress)