The disturbing return of 'scientific rigging' charges
The Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar is turning into a political confrontation that’s threatening to spread like wildfire to the four states and one Union territory due for assembly polls in 2026.
The documentary proofs required to verify citizenship under the new SIR rules are highly unusual. It seems not all citizens are presumed equal in the eyes of the Election Commission. Voters who have been enrolled after 2003, when the previous SIR was conducted, need a new set of documents that effectively delegitimises Aadhaar, voter IDs, ration cards, MGNREGA job cards and even passports. In 2025, voters need to produce birth certificates for themselves and their parents, land deeds and revenue receipts.
By adding this new list of documents, the EC has inserted itself into the vicious political clash that routinely descends into accusations of being ‘anti-national’, converting the accuser into a self-appointed vigilante. The disruptive format and the obvious rush to get it done have transformed the Bihar election into a confrontation between the EC and non-NDA political parties. The face-off will likely spread to West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry, where the next round of elections are scheduled in 2026.
The list of additional documents demanded is problematic for more reasons than one. Neither the Union home ministry nor the police in states that have recently embarked on a mission to identify and deport illegal immigrants from Bangladesh accept land deeds, school certificates, revenue receipts, pension records, caste or other certificates as proof of citizenship. As it happens, some deportees submitted land deeds, school certificates and revenue receipts going back beyond a generation.
The West Bengal government has been dealing with thousands of such cases of wrongful deportation from the BJP-ruled states Haryana, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh— where, to be Bengali-speaking, lungi-wearing and Muslim seem to be enough evidence of illegality.
In West Bengal, the legitimacy of residents as citizens has loomed larger with every election for over a decade, coinciding with the BJP’s ascent as a challenger to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. Politics has divided the state’s population into Hindu and Muslim vote banks—the first group deemed citizens by virtue of their religious identity and the second often deemed illegitimate because of the presumption of illegal migration.
The politics of weaponising the legitimacy of citizens as voters has an even longer history in Assam. The rise of Asom Gana Parishad in the 1980s was based on a demand for verifying citizenship and excluding anyone the party deemed not a ‘bhumiputra’ (son of the soil).
The timing of the SIR in Bihar—which is just the beginning, as Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar announced—is a political bunker-buster grenade with the pin pulled out. The EC is not mandated by the Constitution to undertake this verification; its job is to enlist voters and remove dead persons or fake voters, including those whose names have been incorrectly listed more than once. A clarification is necessary that not all fake voters can be presumed to be illegal Muslim immigrants given documents by political parties, as has been alleged by the BJP.
Fake voting and “scientific rigging” by the CPI(M)-led Left Front was converted into a mammoth protest by Banerjee, who launched a mission in 1993 to forcibly occupy Writers’ Buildings, the state secretariat at the time, and throw out the Jyoti Basu government. Distribution of EPIC (Electors’ Photo Identification Card) or voter card was initiated in 1993 to weed out fake voters and, by extension, kill the rigging methodology the Congress alleged had been put in place by the CPI(M).
The EC’s SIR exercise, however, is different—it is focused on citizenship, not falsification or misrepresentation. Even before SIR was unrolled in Bihar, Banerjee had sounded the tocsin about revising the rolls in West Bengal and warned that the opposition had to prepare to fight the EC over inclusions and exclusions. Post the Maharashtra polls, her politically hyper-sensitive antenna had interpreted the emanating signals for potential trouble over the rolls and a revision in the EC’s jargon.
“The cat is out of bag as to how the BJP is manipulating the voter list with the blessing of the EC,” Banerjee declared in February 2025 after reports that voter IDs with the same EPIC number had been issued in more than one state. In March, she accused the EC of issuing duplicate IDs in Haryana and Gujarat. The accusation amplified Rahul Gandhi’s charge that some 39 lakh new voters had been added in Maharashtra in just five months before the assembly elections.
In Bihar, SIR could disenfranchise up to an estimated 2 crore or 25 percent of the voters. The July 9 state-wide agitation called by opposition parties looks like the start of a battle that will spread to Bengal. In March, Banerjee declared that as a person who had gone on a 26-day hunger strike in 2006 to protest against the then state government, “If required, we will protest indefinitely in front of the EC office.”
India’s electoral democracy project—a bold adventure when it began in 1950—had a very large purpose as an inclusive exercise through universal adult franchise. With that backdrop, EC’s current agenda is open to interpretation as a multipurpose de-weeding machine that goes to the heart of that project.
Shikha Mukerjee | Senior journalist based in Kolkata
(Views are personal)