The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to specify which documents were considered during the 2003 intensive electoral roll revision in Bihar, as it continued hearing pleas challenging the Commission’s June 24 decision to carry out a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the state.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi sought the clarification after advocate Nizam Pasha, appearing for one of the petitioners, questioned the legal basis for using January 1, 2003, as a benchmark date. Pasha argued that there was no evidence explaining why this date was chosen and disputed the notion that voter ID cards issued during the 2003 intensive revision were inherently more reliable than those issued in routine summary revisions.
“If the process for enrolment under both intensive and summary revisions is the same, there is no justification to treat EPIC cards from summary revisions as less valid,” Pasha submitted, adding that the date lacked “intelligible differentia.” He also alleged that booth-level officers were not issuing receipts for submitted enrolment forms, giving them excessive discretion over whether to accept applications.
Senior advocate Shoeb Alam, representing another petitioner, criticised the ECI notification, calling the introduced procedure neither truly “intensive” nor “summary” but “a creation of the notification” itself. “This is a process of voter registration, not disqualification. It should be a process to welcome, not to unwelcome,” Alam told the court.
The bench, which had on August 13 observed that electoral rolls cannot remain “static,” maintained that the EC holds residual powers to conduct such exercises. It also noted that expanding the list of acceptable identity documents from seven to eleven for Bihar’s SIR made the process “voter-friendly and not exclusionary.”
Petitioners, including opposition leaders from the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Congress as well as the NGO Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), have challenged the legality and necessity of the Bihar revision drive, arguing it has no statutory basis. The court will continue hearing the matter after the ECI responds on the 2003 documentation process.
