A Judgment That Gets The Law Right And The Voter Wrong
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-05-29 02:54:57
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
Somewhere in Muzaffarpur, a man who has voted in every election since 2004 will discover, possibly on election day, that his name is no longer on the roll. He will not have received notice. He will not know why. He will certainly not have a lawyer. The Supreme Court's answer to his situation, delivered in its May 27 judgment in Association for Democratic Reforms vs Election Commission of India, is that he may seek judicial review. That answer tells you everything about what this judgment gets wrong.
Let's begin, in fairness, with what it gets right.
Bihar's electoral rolls were genuinely broken. Over two decades had passed since the last Special Intensive Revision. Rapid urbanisation and large-scale migration had produced rolls thick with duplicates, dead voters, and multiply-recorded migrants. The ECI's decision to act had a sound statutory basis. The court correctly traces it to Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, read with Article 324.
More importantly, the court draws a necessary constitutional line. The ECI may examine citizenship, but only for the limited purpose of determining inclusion or exclusion from the roll. Deletion is not a declaration of non-citizenship. Final adjudication remains with the competent authority under the Citizenship Act. Without this guardrail, the SIR could have quietly become a backdoor NRC. The court refused that, and the refusal matters.
But the failures are serious.
What the ECI conducted was not a revision of existing rolls. It was a demolition of them - discarding nearly three decades of work through which successive Commissions had achieved approximately 99 per cent accuracy. The 2024 general election was conducted on these very rolls without challenge. Section 21(3) authorises revision, not replacement. The court never engaged with this distinction. It is the judgment's central silence, and it is damning.
The choice of the 2003 roll as the baseline compounds the damage. Every voter enrolled in the last 21 years must re-verify. This is not a random sample of the electorate. This is the young woman enrolled under SVEEP after years of outreach. The migrant worker who finally got on the rolls. The first-time voter whose inclusion was celebrated as a democratic achievement. These are not suspect entries. They are the gains of twenty years of democratic deepening, and the court has validated a process that puts all of them at risk.
Then there is the quiet cruelty of the documentation requirement. The Elector's Photo Identity Card - issued by the state, carried by millions as proof of democratic belonging - has been set aside. Those who have nothing else, and millions do not, are effectively stranded. The court called the ECI's document framework a considered exercise of administrative discretion. That is a generous reading of a framework that leaves the poorest voter with nowhere to turn.
Which brings us back to that man in Muzaffarpur. Over 90 lakh names were deleted from draft rolls in West Bengal alone. Nearly 74 lakh in Tamil Nadu. These are not hypothetical risks. The deletions have already happened. The court's safeguards - the citizenship referral, the four-week timeline, the possibility of restoration - arrive after the damage. A constitutional remedy that operates after disenfranchisement is not protection. It is an epitaph.
And judicial review? That is a remedy for citizens with time, money, and legal literacy. For a daily-wage labourer who does not know he has been deleted, who has never seen a draft roll, and who cannot afford an hour away from work, it is the law performing compassion while ensuring nothing changes.
Clean electoral rolls are essential to democracy. No serious person disputes that. But democracy is not only the machinery of elections. It is the assurance to every citizens, especially the poorest, that the state will not casually erase their place in it. This judgment upholds the machinery. It has little to say about the assurance.
That man in Muzaffarpur had one power. It was the vote. The court has left him to find a lawyer.
