The Supreme Court's (“Court”) decision in Association for Democratic Reforms v Election Commission of India (“ADR v ECI”) is unlikely to be remembered as a particularly happy moment in Indian constitutional law. Delivered in the aftermath of one of the most controversial electoral disputes in recent memory, the judgement resolves virtually every significant question in favour of the Election Commission of India (“ECI” or “Commission”). In so doing, it accorded the Commission an exceptionally broad measure of constitutional and statutory latitude, while displaying a rather sanguine faith in the ability of administrative safeguards to prevent wrongful disenfranchisement. The consequence is a judgement that is markedly more attentive to the problem of keeping allegedly ineligible voters out of the electoral roll than to the equally serious problem of keeping eligible voters in it.
That imbalance runs through the decision from beginning to end.
The SIR and Its Challenge
For context, the litigation arose from the ECI's decision on 24 June 2025 to undertake a Special Intensive Revision ("SIR") of the electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of the impending Assembly elections. The Commission justified the exercise by reference to demographic change, migration, duplication, and concerns regarding the overall accuracy of the rolls. Electors not appearing in the 2003 electoral roll were required to submit enumeration forms accompanied by prescribed documentary proof, failing which their names would not be included in the draft roll.
Naturally, what might otherwise have been presented as a usual exercise in the housekeeping of electoral rolls soon came to be viewed as something considerably more consequential.
The challenge proceeded on three grounds broadly.
Power
First, the petitioners questioned the Commission's authority to undertake the exercise at all. For simply Article 324 could not be treated as an inexhaustible source of constitutional power once Parliament had ‘occupied the field’ (see Mohinder Singh Gill, AC Jose, Kuldip Nayyar) through the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (“RP Act”) and the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 (“Registration Rules”). Nor, it was argued, could s 21(3) of the RP Act be stretched into a charter for a statewide reverification exercise of this scale.
One of the first posts of this blog in fact was precisely about this, I had argued:
“...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…
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…
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.”
Procedure
The petitioners that under the statutory scheme, inclusion in the electoral roll carried with it a presumption of validity that could only be displaced through procedures specifically prescribed by law (see s 16 of the RP Act). The SIR, however, effectively required millions of already enrolled electors to re-establish their entitlement to remain on the roll. In practical terms, the burden shifted from the State demonstrating ineligibility to the elector demonstrating continued eligibility. This concern was amplified by the fact that non-submission of an enumeration form itself resulted in exclusion from the draft roll. The petitioners further argued that the exercise bypassed the safeguards embedded in r 21A of the Registration Rules which contemplates notice, publication, objections and hearing before deletion. They also criticised the absence of clear standards governing scrutiny by Booth Level Officers and Electoral Registration Officers, warning that broad administrative discretion, exercised under compressed timelines, created an appreciable risk of arbitrary exclusion.
The objection, therefore, to put it simply: was (1) a burdensome procedure, that (2) fundamentally inverted the logic of the electoral registration process.
Citizenship
The petitioners contended that one of the evident purposes of the SIR was to facilitate a largescale scrutiny of citizenship status under the guise of electoral roll revision. Such an exercise, they argued, exceeded the Commission's constitutional mandate. They argued that while the ECI undoubtedly may possess the authority to prepare and revise electoral rolls, but the determination of citizenship is governed by an entirely distinct statutory framework principally administered vide Citizenship Act of 1955. The petitioners also demonstrated how an elector called upon to establish citizenship in order to remain on the roll faces consequences that closely resemble a citizenship determination, even if formally described otherwise.
The SIR was therefore said to confer upon electoral officials a function which they were not competent to undertake (i.e. attacking competence), while at the same time exposing large numbers of voters to citizenship scrutiny through an administrative process lacking the safeguards ordinarily associated with such determinations (i.e. attacking design).
The Litigation’s Changed Shape
The original challenge was directed at the legality of the SIR: i.e. whether the ECI possessed the authority to undertake the SIR, i.e. whether the procedure it adopted was consistent with the statutory scheme, i.e. whether the exercise impermissibly introduced citizenship scrutiny into the electoral registration process, and so on.
Ordinarily, one might have expected the Court to engage these questions through the familiar lens of legality review. Which is to say by asking whether the impugned notification was lawful on the date it was issued. Instead, the Court adopted what commentators have described as a form of dialogic review. Rather than suspending the exercise or testing its legality in isolation, the Court entered into an ongoing institutional dialogue with the Commission, identifying perceived deficiencies and encouraging their subsequent correction.
As the litigation progressed, therefore, the SIR scheme that ultimately came before the Court for adjudication was no longer the SIR scheme that had originally been challenged (see “The Story of Five Improvisations” below).
The Story of Five Improvisations
On 10 July, while issuing notice, the Court identified three principal concerns: (i) the Commission's authority to undertake the exercise, (ii) the procedure adopted for verifying eligibility and citizenship, and (iii) the timing of the revision immediately preceding the Bihar Assembly elections. Significantly, however, the Court declined to stay the exercise. Instead, it suggested that the Commission consider accepting Aadhaar Cards, Electors Photo Identity Cards (EPICs), and Ration Cards in addition to the eleven documents originally prescribed.
The shape of the litigation altered further after publication of the draft electoral roll on 1 August 2025, which excluded approximately sixty-five lakh electors. On 14 August, the Court directed the ECI to publish the names of excluded electors together with reasons for exclusion and to ensure wide dissemination through newspapers, electronic media, and radio. Excluded electors were also permitted to submit claims supported by Aadhaar Cards.
On 22 August, the Court went further still, and impleaded twelve major political parties to mobilise Booth Level Agents to assist electors with the submission of forms and supporting documents.
Thereafter, on 1 September 2025, the Commission informed the Court that claims and objections would continue to be entertained beyond the original deadline and up to the last date of nominations. On the same occasion, the Court enlisted the Bihar State Legal Services Authority and district legal aid institutions to assist voters in filing claims, objections, and corrections.
Finally, on 8 September 2025, the Court formally directed that Aadhaar Cards be accepted as an identity document for the purposes of the SIR, while clarifying that Aadhaar could not constitute proof of citizenship.
(see the SC Observer’s day-wise coverage of SIR Hearings)
By this stage, the proceedings had assumed a distinctly dialogic character. The Court had become an active participant in reshaping the terms on which that action would proceed. This matters because many of the procedural safeguards that later featured prominently in the Court's defence of the SIR were not contained in the original notification. They emerged during the course of the litigation itself.
The Judgement’s Priors – A Curious Place
Before reaching any doctrinal question, the Court spends some time constructing a narrative. The judgement in ADR v. ECI opens with the republican traditions of ancient Bihar, the Vajji confederacy, colonial electoral administration, and the Constituent Assembly's adoption of universal adult suffrage (¶¶ 1–6). The idea is that electoral rolls are instruments through which a political community determines its own membership.
As the Court puts it:
"[b]efore any representative government can count votes, it must first know whose votes may be counted" (¶ 1).
The judgement repeatedly emphasises the need for an electoral roll that reflects the "true composition of the political community" (¶ 7). That formulation in many ways foregrounds concerns of electoral integrity while pushing concerns of wrongful exclusion into the background. It appears to assume that the principal threat is an inaccurate roll. Much of what follows can be read as an elaboration of that assumption and the Court’s historical introduction is a good lens through which the remainder of the case can be viewed.
The Four Questions
After disposing of the preliminary objections and recounting the course of the litigation, the Court distilled the controversy into four questions (¶15).
The first question was whether the ECI possessed the power to undertake the impugned SIR at all. On one level, this was the most basic issue before the Court. Yet beneath this seemingly “most basic” dispute lay a more fundamental disagreement about the nature of the Commission itself. Is the Commission primarily a statutory actor operating within a framework prescribed by Parliament? Or is it a constitutional institution endowed with an independent sphere of authority that survives legislative intervention? Because when Article 324 and parliamentary legislation appear to point in different directions, which one gives way?
The second question concerned purpose and proportionality. Specifically, the Court asked whether the SIR was founded upon a legitimate objective and whether the measures adopted by the Commission were proportionate to that objective. Notice how the court did not ask whether the exercise risked disenfranchisement on a scale incompatible with constitutional democracy. Nor did it ask whether existing electors ought to be subjected to fresh documentary burdens in the first place. The premise underlying the inquiry was that electoral roll accuracy constituted a legitimate constitutional objective. The question therefore became whether the chosen means bore a sufficient relationship to that end.
There is, of course, nothing inherently objectionable about this formulation. But once the objective is accepted as legitimate, attention naturally turns towards the adequacy of safeguards rather than the propriety of the exercise itself. This is important because much of the criticism directed against the SIR that the exercise reversed settled assumptions concerning electoral registration and placed burdens upon electors that ought not to have existed at all.
The third question addressed whether the procedure adopted by the Commission was contrary to the statutory scheme in place. This issue occupied a rather funny position within the litigation. On one hand, it was arguably the petitioners' strongest argument. One need not have adopted a grand theory of constitutional law to understand it. The question was whether the ECI had followed the procedures laid down by law. On the other hand, the challenge was progressively diluted as the litigation evolved (see The Story of Five Improvisations above).
The Court was therefore confronted with the legality of an exercise that had been substantially modified during the course of proceedings.
The fourth and final question concerned citizenship. Here, the Court framed the issue as whether the Commission, in carrying out its constitutional mandate of preparing and maintaining electoral rolls, could scrutinise the citizenship status of persons seeking inclusion or continuation on those rolls.
I am reproducing the core argument. Readers are free – and encouraged, more so – to refer to the piece in full:
“The Court presents its holding as striking a “constitutional balance” between two alternatives that it understands as mutually exclusive: (1) either the ECI enforces the citizenship requirement, or (2) it adjudicates citizenship and thereby exceeds its statutory mandate. If that is so, a genuine balance would have required each of these competing concerns to operate as a meaningful constraint upon the other. For if the ECI’s enquiry were truly limited in both purpose and consequence to the electoral roll (as the “principled distinction” suggests), it is difficult to explain what the competent authority is being asked to adjudicate when the mandatory referral arrives. Conversely, if the referral mechanism were coherent, it could only be because citizenship had already been placed in issue, in which case the claim that the enquiry remains limited simply falls away.
What is thus presented as a “balance” between two distinct enquiries comes to resemble – as noted above – successive stages within a single process concerned with the determination of citizenship. And a distinction which dissolves itself into a single enquiry upon its first application – in any meaningful sense – is not a balance at all.”
Concluding Remarks
Viewed individually, each of these four questions appear discrete. One concerns constitutional authority. Another concerns proportionality. A third concerns statutory compliance. The last concerns citizenship. Yet these questions are deeply interconnected and not remotely as self contained. Each answer is based upon a prior assumption about the nature of electoral democracy, the role of the ECI, and the relationship between electoral integrity and electoral inclusion.
In that sense, the judgement in ADR v ECI seems to be – in essence – a product of reasoning – the central imperative of which – is an “accurate roll.” The rest of the questions answer themselves on their own. Whether constitutional courts ought to assume that role, particularly where the complaint is that the exercise itself is unlawful, is likely to remain the more enduring question the SIR case leaves behind.
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