When the Supreme Court assembled on Oct. 9 to hear a cluster of petitions challenging the SIR of electoral rolls in Bihar, the mood inside the courtroom was one of unease and quiet urgency.
For months, Bihar’s SIR had been under fire for it has been described as the “largest disenfranchisement exercise in India’s democratic history.”
“Thus, 80 lakh, that is, approximately 10% of the total adult population of Bihar has been denied their right to vote. Such a sharp fall in the adult population to electors’ ratio is a record for India and for Bihar,” the written submissions said.Though the official estimate of the adult population in Bihar for September 2025 was 8.22 crore, the number of electors in the final rolls was only 7.42 crore.
A Court Steps In
A Bench of Justices Surya Kant and JoymalyaBagchi, hearing the case, directed the Bihar State Legal Services Authority (BSLSA) to immediately assist those excluded from the final electoral rolls in filing appeals before the EC.District Legal Service Authorities (DLSAs) across Bihar were told to deploy para-legal volunteers and lawyers to help citizens, especially poor and rural voters, file their claims before the fast-approaching deadline.
“These voters must not be left without a remedy,” Justice Kant observed, emphasising that exclusion without proper notice violated the “principles of natural justice.”
The Bench also questioned the EC on whether the 3.66 lakh voters deleted from the final list had been individually informed, as required under Rule 21A of the Registration of Electors’ Rules, 1960. “They have a right to appeal,” Justice Kant observed.
But the judges also struck a note of caution. “We are proceeding with the presumption,” said Justice Kant, “that the authorities know what they are doing.”It was a line that captured the court’s balancing act – between judicial restraint and the growing anxiety that something had gone very wrong in Bihar.
The Numbers That Don’t Add Up
As of June 2024, Bihar had 7.89 crore registered voters. After the draft roll was published, 65 lakh names were struck off. The final roll released in late Sep. showed 7.42 crore electors.But the government’s own estimates placed Bihar’s adult population at 8.22 crore. That meant roughly 80 lakh adults, a tenth of the state’s voting-age citizens, had vanished from the voter rolls.
“This is unprecedented,” argued activist Yogendra Yadav. “No other state in India has ever seen such a steep drop in its electorate. This is not cleaning up the rolls; this is disenfranchisement.”
Yadav also highlighted bizarre irregularities: households with 10 registered voters, new voters aged 100 or above, and instances of names appearing in Tamil and Kannada scripts – in Bihar.“How did such errors slip through an exercise meant to improve accuracy?” he asked in court.
The Missing Women
According to Yadav, the gender ratio in Bihar’s electoral rolls fell from 934 women per 1,000 men in Sep. to 892 after the SIR, signifying the disappearance of nearly 17 lakh women voters.“The EC had to quietly instruct its officers to reinsert names to fill statistical gaps,” Yadav alleged, claiming that many voters who had not submitted even a single document were mysteriously retained to “balance the numbers.”
In court, he presented examples of entries with blank addresses, gibberish names, and missing details of spouses or relations. “This is not just a bureaucratic oversight,” Yadav said. “It reflects a systemic disregard for women and the marginalised.”
‘Aversion to Electoral Process’
Justice Bagchi, while probing the data irregularities, offered a sociological reflection: “Aversion to the electoral process is more visible among the higher social classes,” he said, noting that voter turnout in urban, elite areas often remains “very low.”
In the case of Gopalganj, the district with the highest number of deletions,many voters were labelled “absent” or “permanently shifted” simply because they had migrated for work.As one petitioner’s counsel remarked, “Migration has become a punishment. The poor who go to Delhi or Surat to earn a living are being erased from the voter list in their native village.”
Transparency on Trial
One of the fiercest exchanges in the courtroom came when advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing Opposition leaders and NGOs, accused the EC of “total lack of transparency.”
“Why is the EC refusing to provide the list of 21 lakh added voters and 3.66 lakh deleted voters in a machine-readable format?” Bhushan demanded. He also alleged that many names in the final list were “gibberish” or “inaccessible.” The refusal to make the data public was “undermining the right to information that sustains democracy.”
Justice Bagchi, however, challenged Bhushan to present hard evidence: “Show us at least one such appeal where natural justice was violated.”
The Bench’s scepticism underscored a larger judicial concern: while the petitioners alleged mass violations, few individual victims had come forward with affidavits.To this, Bhushan replied that affidavits had indeed been filed “from responsible sources,” but that many excluded voters were either unaware of their rights or lacked the means to reach court.
Chidambaram Steps In
Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram took to X, asking pointed questions of the EC:“What is the estimate of Bihar’s adult population according to the Government of India? What proportion of that population has been included in the electoral rolls? Is it 90.7%? What about the remaining 9.3%? Why are they missing?”
He also flagged data suggesting 5.2 lakh duplicate entries and over two lakh blank house numbers in the rolls.
The BJP, meanwhile, dismissed these concerns as “alarmist and politically motivated.”
But,as the EC prepares to replicate the SIR model nationwide, fears are mounting that millions more could face silent disenfranchisement.
Exclusion of Muslims
Bhushan’s written submissions to the court went further, alleging a disproportionate exclusion of Muslims from Bihar’s final rolls.“Based on name-recognition software,” he claimed, “Muslims constituted 25% of the 65 lakh names deleted from the draft rolls and 34% of the 3.66 lakh deletions from the final rolls.”
This accounted for the disappearance of roughly six lakh Muslim voters.If true, it would mark a grave distortion of the electoral landscape in a state where Muslims make up about 17% of the population. The EC has denied any communal bias in the process.Yet, as one senior lawyer noted, “When deletion patterns mirror social or religious lines, administrative neutrality becomes a weak defence.”
A Lesson for the Nation
As the hearing drew to a close, Justice Kant turned philosophical. “You have decided to carry out the SIR across the country,” he told the EC. “This experience in Bihar will make you wiser. You will learn from it.”
The Bench adjourned the matter to October 16.But the echoes of the case stretch far beyond the courtroom. The SIR in Bihar is no longer just a bureaucratic audit; it has become a referendum on the credibility of India’s democratic machinery.