The Peoples Union for Civil Liberties Sunday said that it has filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging what it called “arbitrary and unlawful action” of the Election Commission of India (EC) in directing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the entire country, with immediate enforcement in Bihar, only months before the elections in the state.
PUCL president Kavita Srivastava said that its constitutional challenge to the SIR order is based on the argument that this process “represents a direct assault on India’s constitutional democracy, violating the grundnorm of popular sovereignty enshrined in ‘We, The People’.”
“By abandoning statutory house-to-house surveys for arbitrary document-centred exclusions, creating impossible timelines, and systematically disenfranchising marginalised communities, the Election Commission has perverted the constitutional mandate, and inverted the principle of inclusion to that of exclusion,” the PUCL said.
The petition was filed on Saturday through PUCL national general secretary V Suresh.
Terming it an “illegal exercise”, the PUCL said that such an exercise being hastily conducted to cover a population of almost 8 crore is likely to result in exclusion of voters and thereby defeat democracy using the very tools of democracy.
Earlier, citing “lack of due process” and “unreasonably short timeline” for the revision electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar, Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), an NGO, had approached the Supreme Court, challenging the EC exercise by calling it unconstitutional and warning that it will “disenfranchise lakhs of voters”.
In its petition, the PUCL contends that Bihar has a massive migrant population, who work across India and return home to exercise their democratic rights. They face systematic exclusion through this “malicious” SIR process, the human rights organisation said.
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“Migrant workers lack local address proofs, cannot navigate complex form-based procedures from distant locations, and miss compressed timelines due to work commitments. This timing appears deliberately calculated to disenfranchise Bihar’s mobile workforce during crucial electoral periods,” the PUCL said.
In the petition, the PUCL has prayed that the ECI Order and letter dated June 24, 2025, deserves to be quashed for being manifestly arbitrary and that it is also contrary to Article 327 – which grants Parliament the power to make provision with respect to elections to legislatures – read with the relevant Act and Rules.
