The uncertain harvest of SIR

Nearly two months into the legal battle against the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in Bihar, the Supreme Court on Monday directed the ECI to accept the Aadhaar card as the 12th document certifying the identity of voters. The ECI had earlier refused to recognise it as valid identity proof, forcing lakhs of people to scramble for certificates they did not possess. The Court’s directive will have wider implications whenever the Commission undertakes SIR across the country.

Back in Bihar, however, a lot of water has already flown over the past two months. The SIR has turned into a political slugfest between the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA) led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the I.N.D.I.A. bloc led by the Congress. The BJP has defended the ECI’s move as an exercise to weed out illegal foreigners, while the Congress has denounced it as a strike against people’s constitutional right to vote. 

In eastern Bihar’s Seemanchal region, comprising districts such as Purnia, Araria, Khagadia and Kishanganj, and in the northern districts of Madhubani and Sitamarhi, there were voices in support of the SIR. Many said it was needed to “find out illegal Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationals.” Although they complained about the limited time given, they believed that SIR had been launched with good intent. 

On a breezy August afternoon, a group of villagers were playing the card game Twenty Eight – a popular pastime in north Bihar. With the paddy transplantation season nearly over, agrarian life had entered a brief lull, offering farmers some respite before the demanding phase
of crop care began. This would include maintaining water supply, managing weeds, and ensuring young plants grew strong with regular applications of fertilisers and pesticides.

The group sat under the shade of a sprawling banyan tree, taller than the embankment of the Kamla River flowing down from Nepal. On one side of the embankment lay their village, with houses scattered across the landscape; on the other stretched a vast expanse of paddy fields, their green stalks standing in sunlit, stagnant water. The men pointed out that these were floodwaters that refused to recede, slowly damaging the young crop -- a perennial worry in this region.

A casual question about their views on the Special Intensive Revision immediately changed the mood. Each man straightened up, quickly tucking his cards away as eyes shifted to the camera and microphone.

“Sarkar kar rahi hai toh thika hi hoga. Kuch soch ke shuru kiye honge! Kagaz mange the, jo hamne de diye. Samasya bhi huyee...samasya hai toh uska hal bhi hai. Isme khoj toh kagaz ki thi...”, (If the government is doing it, it must be right. They must have given it thought. We gave them the paper they asked for. There were some problems; there were also solutions. This exercise was about paper), said Sewa Ram Yadav in a philosophical tone. But his card partner was less forgiving, having had to run around to procure documents for his daughter-in-law, who is originally from across the border in Nepal.

The SIR exercise across the eight districts – Begusarai, Purnea, Khagadia, Kishanganj, Madhepura, Madhubani, Sitamarhi and Muzaffarpur -- revealed a similar pattern of hardship and frustration among people, though without much open protest against the government. In Jainagar, a small town on the India-Nepal border in the Madhubani district, a group of women undergoing tailoring training echoed the same sentiments.

One of them, visibly agitated, questioned why women from Nepal married to Indian men on this side of the border were being asked to furnish documents to prove their citizenship. She argued that the government should have made provisions for issuing such certificates directly, instead of forcing them to run from pillar to post. Another woman in the group, however, supported the exercise, saying it would identify foreigners and that only Pakistanis or Bangladeshis would have a problem.

In Kishanganj, which has the highest concentration of Muslims, people were scrambling to get their names listed on the electoral roll. They were particularly struggling to obtain residential certificates, one of the 11 documents listed by the ECI as mandatory to prove citizenship and status as a genuine Indian voter. There was a massive backlog in issuing these certificates, particularly in the Muslim-populated areas of the district.

Similarly, in Dalit and Mahadalit hamlets across these districts, confusion prevailed over whether their names had been added or not. A number of migrant labourers encountered in these localities were clueless about the exercise. But in these districts, there was no significant groundswell in favour of the opposition’s “vote-theft” narratives.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s 1,300-km Voter Adhikar Yatra in Bihar against the ECI’s Special Intensive Revision of the electoral roll is reported to have created a buzz in political circles. His march, which concluded in Patna on September 1, is said to have injected life into an otherwise moribund Congress ahead of the Assembly elections.

Against the backdrop of the controversial SIR and allegations of “vote theft”, the Bihar Assembly election is drawing close. The mass deletion of voters -- 65 lakh, according to ECI -- has given the chief opposition party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), its partner Congress, and other allies fresh momentum to hit the streets. 

Rahul Gandhi’s yatra is seen as an attempt to recreate the “Save Constitution” moment, reminiscent of the one that attracted significant support from the Scheduled Castes and Other Backward Classes in the recent past, particularly in the 2024 general election, when Congress improved its tally from 54 seats in 2019 to 99. 

Through the yatra, Rahul Gandhi is said to have sought to evoke similar sentiments among voters, with the central message being that the ECI and the BJP-led government were trying to strip people of their constitutional right to vote through SIR.

The BJP, the largest party in the NDA government in Bihar, is said to be somewhat shaken by the crowds the yatra drew. The party is also reportedly uneasy about Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’s diminishing popularity and the glaring void in its own state leadership.

Over the last couple of months, political consultant-turned-politician Prashant Kishor has targeted three top leaders of BJP -- Deputy Chief Minister Samrat Chaudhary, state president Dilip Kumar Jaiswal and Health Minister Mangal Pandey -- over alleged corruption, creating further trouble for the ruling party’s state leadership. Interestingly, however, SIR as an issue has been absent from his campaign.

As of now, it appears that the SIR has not worked in the ruling party’s favour, though the opposition has also failed to create a mass movement against it. On the ground, people did complain about the short timeframe but have largely supported the exercise. It is expected that as elections draw closer, the BJP will rake up the SIR issue and spin the narrative along communal lines.

The party is likely to tap into the widespread perception that the SIR was meant to detect “Muslim Bangladeshis and Pakistanis” who had allegedly settled illegally and altered the region’s demography. BJP leaders, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, have already begun attacking the Congress for opposing the SIR, accusing it of trying to protect ghuspaithiyas (illegal infiltrators), who they claim form its votebank.

On the ground, even the vocal supporters of opposition parties, including the RJD, admitted that the SIR was justified as a way to remove foreigners from the voters’ list, in addition to other anomalies such as names of deceased persons or those who had migrated.

While there has not been a single report confirming the detection of illegal foreigners, this is unlikely to prevent the BJP and its supporters from spinning the narratives around the supposed demographic change caused by migrants. The communal undertone is expected to be spun aggressively as the election approaches. The test for the opposition will be whether it can frame its political narrative around the SIR strongly enough to withstand the BJP’s formidable machinery turning it into the main polarising issue.