SIR of electoral rolls in Tamil Nadu will begin in a week or so: Election Commission tells Madras High Court

Poll panel assures the court that it will follow all directions given by the Supreme Court in a case related to SIR in Bihar, while conducting the exercise in Tamil Nadu

Chennai: Just six months to go for the Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu, the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Friday informed the Madras High Court that it would commence the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the State in a week.

Niranjan Rajagopalan, counsel for the ECI, told the first Division Bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G Arul Murugan that the SIR would commence in a “week or so” as part of the nationwide exercise. 

The ECI also gave an assurance to the court that it would follow all directions given by the Supreme Court in a case related to SIR in Bihar, while conducting the exercise in Tamil Nadu. The State will go for polls in April-May 2026, and political parties like the ruling DMK have already been asking people to be vigilant and cautious while participating in the exercise.

The DMK, which is a constituent of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, has been opposed to SIR in Bihar by raising questions over the credibility of the Election Commission. DMK president and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin shared the dais with Congress' Rahul Gandhi and RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav in one of the Jan Adhikar Yatras in Bihar against the SIR exercise, which the parties termed an “exclusionary exercise”.

During the hearing, the ECI’s counsel informed the court that the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners have already held consultations with the Chief Electoral Officers on the SIR exercise in other States, including Tamil Nadu. 

The submissions by the ECI counsel were made during the hearing of a PIL petition filed by a former AIADMK MLA B Sathyanarayanan, who sought a direction to the ECI to conduct a complete and transparent re-verification of the electoral rolls related to his T. Nagar constituency.

Sathyanarayanan lost the 2021 elections to DMK’s J Karunanithi by a slender margin of 137 votes. 

“The extremely narrow margin of 137 votes, compared with the thousands of wrongful deletions/inclusions, clearly establishes the irregularities which materially altered the election result,” the former MLA said in his petition. 

Sources told DH that the Chief Electoral Officer, Tamil Nadu, has been holding discussions with district officials on the SIR exercise in the State. “With the elections just six months away, we have to start the process by November and complete it by January. Only then will we be able to prepare for the April-May polls,” the source added.