Stretching the Exception — On Bihar Electoral Rolls Revision and the ECI's Overreach under Section 21 RPA

On 24 June 2025, the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar. It appears to be, on its face, an ambitious exercise. For over seven crore entries are to be verified, re-submitted, or deleted within a 90-day window. A first of its kind since 2003, the SIR aims to achieve three objectives: (a) ensure that every eligible citizen is enrolled and no one is excluded, (b) remove all ineligible voters from the rolls, and (c) eliminate dead, shifted, or absentee voters.

Coming just months before the state assembly elections, the ECI has justified this intensified exercise by pointing to factors such as rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, the influx of newly eligible young voters, underreporting of deaths, and the inclusion of names of foreign illegal immigrants. 

Writing on Constitutional Law and Philosophy, Vasudev Devadasan has already outlined the gravity of the moment. In his tightly argued breakdown, he highlights: (i) the SIR exercise risks disenfranchising existing voters, particularly those added after the 2003 revision, by imposing retrospective verification burdens with no statutory basis, (ii) the ECI’s documentary exclusions (notably Aadhaar, EPIC voter IDs, and ration cards) are misaligned with both statutory mandate and administrative reality, and (iii) the compressed timeline, wedged between a summer announcement and an autumn election, compromises the ability of voters to meaningfully respond to errors or exclusions.

In this essay, I do not intend to rehearse those arguments. Instead, I aim to highlight a concern that is less visible, but perhaps equally structural.

I submit that the ECI’s discretion under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) has been misread to authorise a form of jurisdictional expansion it was never meant to enable.

Section 21(3) of the RPA reads as follows:

“Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-section (2), the Election Commission may at any time, for reasons to be recorded, direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency in such manner as it may think fit:

Provided that subject to the other provisions of this Act, the electoral roll for the constituency, as in force at the time of the issue of any such direction, shall continue to be in force until the completion of the special revision so directed.”

This clause is the statutory basis on which the ECI has grounded its SIR of the Bihar electoral rolls. On a plain reading, the text suggests a wide scope. It allows the Commission (I use ECI and “the Commission” interchangeably) to order a “special revision” at “any time,” and to do so in a manner it “thinks fit.” However, statutory breadth is never a free pass. 

To begin with, Section 21(3) is an exception to the general rule under Section 21(2), which contemplates annual revisions of the electoral roll. Seen in this light, the statutory scheme becomes relatively clear — for it indicates that routine revisions are to form the foundation of electoral roll maintenance, while special revisions are meant to step in only when routine mechanisms fall short. So understood, Section 21(3) functions as a safeguard, not an alternative pathway. The power to conduct special revisions must therefore remain tethered to the structure within which it is situated.

In Bihar, however, the ECI has used Section 21(3) to launch what is effectively a ground-up reinvention of the electoral roll. Over seven crore entries are to be reverified, updated, or deleted within a 90-day window. This is no minor intervention. It is an exercise of staggering scale, with deep electoral consequences. The criteria invoked (migration, urbanisation, underreporting of deaths, and presence of alleged illegal immigrants) are undeniably serious, but none of them justify an inversion of the presumption of continuity that the RPA’s electoral roll provisions rest upon. 

This suggests a deeper structural problem. The Commission appears to be stretching the provision’s scope beyond what the Parliament had likely contemplated. When a statute authorises a “special revision,” it assumes that the normal revision has occurred or will occur in accordance with law, and that the special revision will operate as a limited corrective mechanism. The “reasons to be recorded” requirement perhaps even reinforces this logic. On such a reading, special revisions, in other words, would respond to identifiable contingencies, and not broad governance concerns. To allow otherwise risks blurring the line between the Commission’s role as a supervisor and the operational logic of an executive bureaucracy.

This becomes clearer through illustration. For instance, take “migration.” Internal migration in India, especially in states like Bihar, is a continuous phenomenon. Treating this as a trigger for a state-wide intensive revision has potential to turn what should be an exceptional measure into a routine one. Similarly, while underreporting of deaths is a long-standing challenge, it has never, until now, been seen as grounds for a statewide electoral overhaul.