On a humid afternoon in the outskirts of Patna, 28-year-old Bhola Ram, a migrant worker from a small village in Muzaffarpur district, sits amidst a scatter of paper documents—his Aadhaar card, a copy of his father’s voter ID, and a stale ration card—clutching a deletion notice slipped under his door. The notice states that his name has been removed from the draft electoral roll under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI).
“My fate is worthless, is it? Do I not even have the right to vote?” he asks. His anguish echoes across thousands of villages and urban wards in Bihar – and, increasingly, beyond it – as the SIR exercise now expands to 12 other states and UTs. What began as a state-specific “purification” of rolls in Bihar has evolved into a nationwide voter-verification campaign, raising questions about inclusion, transparency and constitutional rights.
From Bihar to a National Template
Bihar’s 2025 assembly election, the 243-seat contest scheduled for November 6 and 11, is more than just a state poll. It prefigures national trends in voter verification. Between June and August 2025, the ECI undertook an exhaustive revision of Bihar’s 7.9 crore electors through house-to-house verification. Similar drives will now cover nearly 51 crore voters in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Puducherry, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Lakshadweep, making this the largest coordinated revision since 2010.
While the ECI describes these drives as integrity measures to ensure “pure rolls,” civil society groups warn they risk becoming instruments of mass disenfranchisement – particularly for migrant workers, minorities, Dalits, tribals, and the poor, who face higher documentation barriers. In constitutional terms, the SIR has become a litmus test: does it reinforce Article 326’s universal adult suffrage, or erode it for those already marginalised?
The Bihar Precedent: Mechanics and Early Warnings
In Bihar, under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act 1950, and invoking Article 324, the ECI carried out a full enumeration through Booth Level Officers (BLOs). As per official figures, the number of electors stood at 7.89 crore on 24 June 2025, but dropped to 7.24 crore in the draft list of 1 August. Around 65 lakh names were deleted, while only 21.5 lakh new voters were added.
Field reports from Seemanchal and Magadh revealed serious procedural inconsistencies: citizens were asked for multiple documents, while migrant or seasonal workers were marked “untraceable.” Many received deletion notices despite prior form submissions. Opposition leaders likened the exercise to “NRC-lite.” The ECI defended it as “zero-tolerance for fake voters,” yet its compressed timeline – barely months before polls – posed questions of due process and equality before law (Article 14).
The Human Cost: Marginalised Voices Under SIR
- Dalits and Adivasis
Minorities, and Deprived Sections are all affected by the SIR in Bihar. In Muzaffarpur, the Ram family of the Valmiki community found two adult siblings’ names struck off after their jamabandhi address changed and no new form was submitted. “We worked in someone’s field; we moved; we never got the new form,” the father explains, adding that “now they say our names don’t count.” A July 2025 NACDAOR (National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Organisations) survey found that more than 71% of Dalit respondents feared they could lose their vote due to SIR. With SCs constituting about one in six people in Bihar, the potential disenfranchisement carries real electoral weight.
Historically, Dalits have faced structural exclusionfrom landlessness to educational deprivation. The NACDAOR report highlights persistent landlessness and deep economic dependence among Dalits in Bihar. As voting becomes a key instrument of representation and social justice, any disruption to ballot access is more than administrative; it symbolises ongoing exclusion.
- Minorities
In Kishanganj, Mohammed Farooq, an elderly weaver, was told his name was missing because his registration form was not received, despite decades of registration. “I submitted the form at home. I’ve worked in Patna for a long time, and when I returned, this notice was waiting,” he says. Muslims in Bihar, roughly one in eight residents, face a double bind of migratory livelihoods and document requirements. The risk of deletion fuels anxiety in an atmosphere where “illegal migrant” rhetoric is on the rise. Opposition voices link SIR to fears of Muslim disenfranchisement, arguing the process undermines Articles 29 and 15, which protect minority cultural and civic rights. Deletions appear concentrated in Muslim-majority blocks, even as the ECI maintains universal application. The Supreme Court is hearing writs challenging the deletion of over 6.5 million names in Bihar. (LawBeat)
- Migrant and Deprived Sections
In urban fringes of Gaya and Patna’s construction sites, thousands of migrant labourers from backward castes and EBCs face heightened risk, since SIR requires present proof of residence at enumeration. Migrants who leave for seasonal work often miss forms or miss deadlines. The NACDAOR survey notes that migration and informal work are intrinsic to EBC/SC life in Bihar. (Squirrels) The ECI data flagged 5.23 million people not found at addresses; the untraced segment is largely migrants and inter-state workers. (The Economic Times)
In short, SIR’s timing and method threaten to disproportionately affect caste-marginalised, economically deprived, and document-poor communities. NACDAOR’s Ashok Bharti warned, “In Bihar, the vote – the last remaining right of the Dalit – is under siege. This is the new caste violence.” (The Wire)
Meanwhile, a BJP MLA dismissed such concerns as “fake sympathy.” Whether the process considers caste-class intersectionality is a key question.
Political Battleground: Alliances, Accusations and Electoral Math
If disenfranchisement is the social fallout of SIR, its political reverberations are equally intense. It has transformed from a bureaucratic exercise into a major political flashpoint in Bihar’s 2025 assembly polls and beyond. The BJP–JD(U) alliance projects it as a “cleansing” of electoral rolls to eliminate bogus entries and reinforce electoral integrity, while critics view it as an attempt to consolidate Hindu upper-caste votes. The Congress-RJD-led INDIA bloc brands it a “vote-suppression drive,” organising “Save the Vote” campaigns, filing mass appeals against deletions, and pledging caste-based audits if elected. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav has promised post-poll scrutiny to recover the 122-seat majority, framing SIR as a political weapon rather than mere administration.
What began in Bihar now reverberates across India, as similar revision drives in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and other states raise fears of systematic disenfranchisement. In Jharkhand, tribal voters report targeted exclusions in Scheduled Tribe districts, while in Maharashtra, slum migrants fear being marked as “shifted,” risking the loss of nearly 10-15% of the informal urban electorate.
These patterns pose grave constitutional concerns. Under Article 324, the Election Commission must ensure “free and fair” elections, yet the timing and selective deletions suggest structural bias, violating Article 14’s equality principle. Analysts warn that even a 2-3% deletion differential in minority, Dalit or EBC-heavy constituencies could swing 10-15 seats toward the NDA, reshaping coalitions and altering democratic balance.
As SIR expands nationwide, Bihar remains the bellwether – testing whether India’s elections uphold the constitutional promise of an inclusive and equal franchise.
Bihar’s Electoral Roll Purge: A Test of Constitutional Faith
The Special Intensive Revision in Bihar sits at a perilous crossroads: a bid to raise electoral integrity that risks undermining the inclusive franchise at the heart of India’s constitutional soul. What began as a technical administrative exercise has become a stark test of democratic fidelity, where every Bhola Ram, a Dalit labourer in Muzaffarpur whose name was quietly struck off amid migration woes, and every Mohammed Farooq, a backward weaver in Kishanganj fretting whether his vote endures the “infiltrator” purge, embodies the existential stakes. These are not mere footnotes in a voter ledger; they are the Republic’s pulse, beating with the fears of minorities, Dalits, and the deprived whose ballots have long been the great equaliser against entrenched hierarchies.
Partial lifelines exist – the Election Commission’s post-SIR appeals window, now a frantic lifeline for the document-starved, and the pending Supreme Court petitions, including the Association for Democratic Reforms’ sharp-edged litigation against the Voters’ Confidence in India League – yet they whisper of remedies too narrow for the wound. The moral imperative runs deeper: constitutional rights, enshrined in Articles 14, 325, and 326, endure only when the weakest among us can stride to the booth with unbowed confidence, their dignity uncompromised by procedural shadows.
As Bihar’s machinery hums toward the November 6-11 showdown, and SIR’s blueprint unfurls across Maharashtra’s migrant slums and Jharkhand’s tribal hamlets, the clarion call rings out: citizens, jurists, advocates, and institutions must stand sentinel. The ballot is no inert slip of paper; it is the fierce affirmation of equality, dignity, and citizenship, the thread binding a billion dreams to Ambedkar’s vision. As the architect of that vision warned in the Constituent Assembly: “However good a constitution may be, it will prove to be worthless if those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot.”
In this sentinel state, as alliances teeter and coalitions hang by a 2-3% thread, the nation holds its breath. Will Bihar’s 2025 polls affirm the Constitution’s promise – or defer it to the margins once more? The answer lies not in Patna’s halls, but in the quiet resolve of those whose votes were nearly stolen. In this pivotal moment, democracy must either ascend to new heights or confront its deepest flaws.