Bihar SIR: Reinforcing the Dominant Narrative
Muralidharan
THE Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar in 2025, presented as a routine administrative clean-up, has instead become one of the most controversial and troubling episodes of voter disenfranchisement in recent memory. Under the ruse of “purifying” the rolls, the exercise has removed lakhs of voters—disproportionately women, minorities, and the poor. From the outset, the process was shrouded in enigma, giving rise to legitimate concerns including fairness of the entire process.
That this contentious exercise was carried out without prior consultation with political parties—key stakeholders in the electoral process—is itself suspicious. Ironically, the three-member Election Commission of India (ECI), soon after assuming office, had initiated talks with political parties on electoral reforms. Yet, while the Bihar SIR and the nationwide revision were being planned, nationally recognised parties, including the CPI(M), which had positively responded to the ECI’s initiative, were kept in the dark. The ECI’s conduct, at times dismissive and at times bordering on threats, seemed to mock those seeking accountability. We saw the spectacle of an obstinate ECI rebutting and publicly countering legitimate concerns flagged by the opposition.
Shifting the Onus
Unlike normal revisions where the enumerator (now called the BLO) fills the forms, under the SIR the forms handed out by the BLOs were to be filled by the voter. With literacy levels in Bihar being one of the lowest in India, one can well imagine the difficulties that the ordinary voter would have been put to. Apart from the voter, the ECI also sought to shift the onus on to the political parties, as though it were their responsibility. Through public statements it sought to blame the inactiveness of Booth Level Agents (BLAs) of political parties.
Exclusion, the Hallmark
SIR’s procedures magnified exclusion through bureaucratic rigidity. Initially, the ECI refused to accept common identity documents—including its own Voter ID card. Aadhaar, which otherwise has become a compulsory document to possess, despite near-universal coverage, was accepted only after Supreme Court’s intervention—by which time, the damage had been done.
This insistence on only certain kinds of documents, punished precisely those least documented: rural women, the Muslim minority, migrants, and the poor. In Bihar, where few women possess property or tenancy papers and many relocate after marriage, mass deletions followed almost inevitably.
Ordinarily, a revision would have led to an expansion of the voter list. This time, the opposite occurred. Bihar’s electorate shrank from 7.8 crore to 7.4 crore. Nearly 38 lakh names were deleted at the final verification stage alone—in many cases without prior notice.
Women: The share of women voters dropped from 47.7 per cent to 47.2 per cent. In 43 constituencies, women accounted for over 60 per cent of the deletions; in some districts, the figure exceeded 63 per cent. The state’s gender ratio in the voter list has now declined to 892.
Minorities: Name-based analyses by independent researchers indicate that districts with sizeable Muslim populations recorded deletion rates far above the state average. A study led by psephologist and political activist Yogendra Yadav estimated that Muslims, who constitute 16.9 per cent of Bihar’s population, accounted for nearly one-third of all deletions. In Kishanganj, about 12 per cent of the electorate vanished. Muslim women, positioned at the intersection of gender and religious discrimination, were doubly affected.
Judicial Interventions
With the ECI refusing to address multiple representations from opposition parties, several petitions reached the Supreme Court. The Court, however, appeared reluctant to engage fully with the petitioners’ contentions. Its eventual direction—to accept Aadhaar as proof—came too late. Its most recent order merely calls for free legal aid to 3.7 lakh excluded voters, even as the bench chastised petitioners for having “too much passion and less reason”.
Crucially, the Court avoided the larger issue of the ECI’s opacity—one of the core concerns raised by multiple petitioners.
The “Ghuspatiya” Narrative
The Commission claimed that the SIR followed the “standards” of the 2003 roll revision, yet it refused to share those very guidelines, despite RTI requests and court directives. Effectively, the ECI demanded trust in a process it declined to disclose.
Even this claim was misleading. The 2003 guidelines explicitly stated: “It is clarified that it is not the job of the enumerator to determine the citizenship of an individual. However, they have the power and responsibility to exclude any person on the basis of qualification for registration regarding age or ordinary residence.”
In stark contrast, the ECI in 2025 went beyond its mandate, invoking the need to identify so-called “foreigners”. The logic of Assam’s NRC and the Citizenship Amendment Act echoed through the exercise. The BJP’s communal rhetoric of the imagined ghuspatiya (infiltrator)—previously deployed during neighbouring Jharkhand’s assembly elections—was now imported into Bihar, a state with sizeable Muslim and Bengali-speaking populations. And this came in the background of the targetting of Bengali speaking population in the national capital Delhi and other places.
By invoking “foreigners” and “bogus voters,” the ECI reinforced a discourse the ruling party has long cultivated—where electoral purity is equated with national purity. Acts of deletion thus acquire ideological weight: they symbolize the cleansing of the body politic from supposed contamination by the ghuspatiya, the infiltrator—the Muslim from across the border.
As Bihar’s elections approach, Union Home Minister Amit Shah defended the SIR on October 10, claiming that the Muslim population had increased due to “infiltration.” Earlier, on September 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “infiltrators” would have to leave. Bihar and the country will hear more of this as the election campaign progresses.
The Obsession with “Purity”
The obsession with “purifying” the rolls reflects a deeper authoritarian drift in Indian governance. It resonates with the neo-fascistic tendencies of the BJP-led government and mirrors the Hindutva project of othering and disenfranchising particular communities. Trust among neighbours has been eroded; suspicion has become the new normal.
Despite repeated claims, the ECI has refused to disclose data on “infiltrators” allegedly detected or deleted—even in Kishanganj, which borders Nepal and West Bengal.
Power and Control
At the ground level, the SIR reshaped local political economies. It created a new network of verifiers and officials with growing discretionary authority over who remained on the rolls. In districts where the ruling coalition dominated the bureaucracy, this blurred the line between administrative procedure and political engineering.
Autonomy Eroded, Faith Lost
The lack of consultation, the haste of implementation, the opacity of procedure, invoking of the communal narrative combined with its combative posture have all contributed to the ECI being perceived as partisan and aligned with the ruling party’s interests among the vast mass of the Indian people. This perception also gets strengthened when one looks at the procedure for appointments. Going against the Supreme Court’s suggestion of a three-member committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition and the Chief Justice of India to choose the CEC and other Commissioners, the BJP government opted for a committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the leader of the opposition. This erosion of faith in the Commission, its loss of credibility as also its compromised autonomy does not augur well for the institution as also for democracy.
