Weaponisation of SIR

In West Bengal and Bihar, millions are being stripped of their access to food and welfare after being left out of electoral rolls

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was presented by the Election Commission of India as a routine exercise to clean up electoral rolls — removing the deceased, the duplicate, and the absent. It has since become something far more dangerous.

In West Bengal and Bihar, both now governed by the BJP for the first time, the SIR is being wielded as an instrument to strip millions of their access to food, welfare, and basic State protections. The consequences are severe, and the communities most likely to be affected are India’s most defenceless.

Within days of taking office, West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s Cabinet announced that those deleted from voter rolls under the SIR would be ineligible for welfare schemes.

The state’s new Annapurna Yojana — replacing the TMC’s Lakshmir Bhandar — explicitly excludes SIR-deleted individuals, while carving out an exception for those who have applied under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). In Bihar, Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary went further, declaring that the deleted would receive no government benefits “including ration”, and that their bank passbooks would be cancelled “in due course”. In his own words: “Those who do not exist, how can they get ration?”

The legal infirmity of these moves is plain. Former Supreme Court judge Justice Madan Lokur has stated unambiguously that voter lists serve “the limited purpose of voting” and that extending their reach to determine welfare eligibility “can result in chaos”.

Former Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat has noted that “there are many government schemes where citizenship is not a criteria” and that for those where it is, it is the home ministry — not the Election Commission — that determines citizenship. Former Madras High Court judge Justice K Chandru has been more direct: “SIR has nothing to do with welfare schemes. The action taken by the two governments is completely illegal.”

The right to food is not a privilege conditional upon voter registration. It flows from the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution — a right guaranteed not merely to citizens but to all persons on Indian soil.

Linking ration access to SIR status is, on its face, unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court’s own ruling upholding the SIR confirms this. It explicitly clarifies that SIR verification is not the final word on citizenship, and that determination remains with the Union government under the Citizenship Act.

The scale of exclusion is staggering. In West Bengal, nearly 91 lakh names were removed from the rolls, including over 27 lakh flagged for ‘logical discrepancies’ — name mismatches, spelling errors, clerical mistakes — whose appeals remained unheard when the state went to polls. In Bihar, around 47 lakh voters were struck off.

Researchers and activists have long documented how administrative errors disproportionately fall upon those who are already marginalised and face persistent barriers in accessing documents — Dalits, Adivasis, women, the poor, and religious minorities. These are exactly the people most reliant on State welfare. Excluding them effectively punishes Indian citizens for the State’s own record-keeping failures.

The communal dimension of what is unfolding cannot be overlooked. The BJP’s campaign in West Bengal was built around the slogan of ghuspaithiyas (infiltrators), deployed almost exclusively as a coded reference to Muslims.

Home Minister Amit Shah declared at a campaign rally that while the Election Commission had “only removed infiltrators from the electoral rolls”, the BJP’s larger task would be to “drive them out of the country’s borders”. In Parliament, he framed the SIR’s purpose as to “detect, delete and deport”.

Meanwhile, the State notification for Annapurna Yojana explicitly protects those who have applied under the CAA — a law that by design excludes Muslims — from exclusion, even as those whose names were deleted for administrative reasons face the full force of the State’s retribution.

The Assam precedent offers a grim preview. The National Register of Citizens in Assam, presided over by the Supreme Court for years at enormous human cost, was quietly abandoned after it excluded more Hindus than Muslims. Yet detention camps built in its wake remain operational.

West Bengal is now moving in the same direction: the state’s home department has directed all 23 districts to establish holding centres for detained “illegal immigrants”, following MHA guidelines issued in May 2025.

The chief minister has announced that alleged infiltrators will be handed over to the BSF rather than produced in court. The SIR in West Bengal is beginning to look less like an electoral exercise and more like the infrastructure for a de facto NRC — one conducted without legislative sanction, judicial oversight, or any reliable data to justify it.

That last point demands emphasis. Neither the Election Commission nor the Union government has made public any figure showing how many actual foreign nationals were detected through the SIR process. The entire edifice of disenfranchisement, welfare denial, and now detention infrastructure rests on an assertion, not a demonstrated fact. With no official count of the infiltrators supposedly found, the inevitable conclusion is that these measures serve a political and ideological purpose, not an administrative one.

The Supreme Court must now go further. Having upheld the SIR as an electoral exercise, it must make equally clear that SIR exclusions cannot determine welfare eligibility for millions of vulnerable citizens.

As Justice Lokur has urged, the court must “come down with a sledgehammer”. With welfare access already being denied, ration cards set to be cancelled, and holding centres being established, the court cannot treat its SIR judgment as the end of the matter. It has both the authority and the obligation to halt this now before it becomes irreversible.

(The author is an assistant professor with the Department of Professional Studies, Christ University, Bengaluru)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.