Aadhaar card not conclusive proof of citizenship: Supreme Court agrees with Election Commission amid SIR row

The court also refused to take an argument that people are having difficulty to find their birth certificates and other documents of their parents.

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that Election Commission is correct in saying that the Aadhaar card cannot be used as a conclusive proof of citizenship as it has to be verified and the poll panel is within its remit to include or exclude someone from the electoral roll on the basis of the citizenship.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi, which began hearing the batch of petitions challenging validity of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, said the row was nothing but "largely a trust deficit issue”.

The Election Commission led by senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi claimed roughly 6.5 crore people of the total 7.9 crore voting population didn't have to file any documents for they or their parents featured in the 2003 electoral roll.

The court also questioned the petitioners challenging the EC’s June 24 decision of conducting the SIR on the ground that it would disenfranchise one crore voters.

"If out of 7.9 crore voters, 7.24 crore voters responded to the SIR, it demolishes theory of one crore voters missing or disenfranchised," the bench told senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for petitioner and RJD leader Manoj Jha.

The court also agreed with the EC decision to not accept Aadhaar and voter cards as conclusive proof of citizenship in the ongoing exercise and said it has to be supported by other documents.

Sibal contended that despite residents holding Aadhaar, ration and EPIC cards, officials refused to accept the documents.

"Is it your argument that people who have no documents but are in Bihar and therefore he should be considered as a voter of the state. That can be allowed. He has to show or submit some documents," the bench said.

When Sibal said people were struggling to find birth certificates and other documents of their parents, Justice Kant said, "It is a very sweeping statement that in Bihar nobody has the documents. If this happens in Bihar, then what will happen in other parts of the country?"

Senior advocate Abhishek Singhvi and advocate Prashant Bhushan, who were representing different parties, also questioned the timeline for the completion of the exercise and the data of 65 lakh voters who were declared as dead or migrated or registered in other constituencies.

Political activist Yogendra Yadav, who addressed the court in person, questioned the data given by the poll panel and said instead of 7.9 crore voters there was total adult population of 8.18 crore and the design of SIR exercise was to delete the voters.

"They (EC) were not able to find any individual whose name was added and the booth level officers visited house to house for deletion of names," Yadav said, calling it a case of "total disenfranchisement".

Sibal during the hearing said while in one constituency, contrary to the poll panel's claims, 12 people declared dead were found alive, in another instance alive persons were declared dead.

Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the poll panel, said the exercise of such a nature was "bound to have some defects here and there at the draft stage" and to claim dead persons were declared alive and alive as dead could always be corrected as it was only a draft roll.

The bench in the beginning of the hearing told the ECI to "be ready" with facts and figures for it would be question over the number of voters before the exercise commenced; number of dead before and now, apart from other relevant details.

The hearing would resume on Wednesday.

On July 28, 2025, the Supreme Court said, instead of en masse exclusion of voters, en masse inclusion should be the goal of the Election Commission as it again suggested the poll panel to include Aadhaar and Voter ID cards as valid documents in the Special intensive Revision of electoral rolls being undertaken in Bihar.

The top court, however, refused to restrain the Election Commission from publishing draft voters list on August 1, 2025.

The court had also clarified that the court can strike down the entire process if any illegality was found.

The EC affidavit has justified its ongoing SIR of electoral rolls in Bihar, saying it adds to the purity of the election by "weeding out ineligible persons" from the electoral rolls.

Beside RJD MP Jha and Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra, Congress' K C Venugopal, Supriya Sule from the Sharad Pawar NCP faction, D Raja from Communist Party of India, Harinder Singh Malik from Samajwadi Party, Arvind Sawant from Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray), Sarfraz Ahmed from Jharkhand Mukti Morcha and Dipankar Bhattacharya of CPI (ML) have jointly moved the top court challenging the June 24 decision of the election commission.

Several other civil society organisations like PUCL, NGO Association of Democratic Reforms and activists like Yogendra Yadav have moved the top court against the EC order.