Opinion Tejashwi Yadav writes: Bihar asked for special status, got ‘Special Exclusionary Revision’

The process has been rushed and chaotic from the start. A detailed review and updation of the state electoral roll was completed by January 2025. The roll was found to be robust. Officials were updating the roll well into June. Suddenly, the ECI called it faulty and junked it, ordering an unprecedented exercise to verify voters from scratch. This abrupt reversal lacks justification and suggests predetermined conclusions rather than genuine concerns about electoral integrity.

The implementation timeline compounds these problems. The SIR was initiated merely four months before the election, a period when voter roll revision becomes logistically and administratively challenging, particularly in a flood-prone and high-migration state like Bihar. The compressed time-frame from June to September leaves voters little opportunity to navigate bureaucratic hurdles, further exacerbated by digital infrastructure gaps and the very real digital divide in the state. Even small-scale deletions could tilt the results in closely contested seats. This creates suspicions about the political motivations behind the exercise.

Bihar’s vulnerabilities make these exclusions particularly cruel. The state faces annual flooding that displaces hundreds of thousands of residents. Migration for work is a survival strategy for millions of families. These realities mean documents get lost, addresses change frequently, and bureaucratic record-keeping fails to capture the lived experiences of Bihar’s citizens. Our long-standing demand for special status and a special developmental package for our state has been to underline and address these vulnerabilities. The citizens of Bihar got neither the special status nor any special package. What we got instead is a special tool for weakening the very idea of citizenship.

According to Rahul Shastri and Yogendra Yadav, the statistical evidence reveals Bihar’s SIR as an exercise in mass deletion, not revision. Using the “missing voters” approach (analogous to Amartya Sen’s “missing women” concept), the data shows a catastrophic shortfall of 94 lakh eligible adults who should be on Bihar’s electoral rolls. The state’s Electors to Adult Population Ratio, according to the Shastri and Yadav, has plummeted from a healthy 97 per cent to just 88 per cent, a dramatic 9 percentage point drop that represents the largest one-time deletion of voters in Indian electoral history.

The SIR in Bihar is explicitly a pilot programme for national implementation. The ECI had on July 5 directed all state polling chiefs to complete “pre-revision activities”, indicating preparations for nationwide rollout. If this model is replicated across India, migrant populations, informal workers, and marginalised communities will bear the brunt of the impossible documentation requirements designed to exclude rather than include. This is a systematic drive toward exclusion, poorly planned and implemented with troubling opacity, obstinacy, and needless bluster by a constitutional body. It needs to be challenged with a strong democratic spirit.

India’s democracy rests on universal adult franchise and equal citizenship. These principles prohibit creating tiers of citizens on any criteria, much less on the ability to produce documents. The Bihar revision does exactly that. Citizens with access to specific documents retain voting rights. Those without lose their fundamental right to participate in a democracy. This violates constitutional guarantees and democratic norms. If replicated nationally, this model could disenfranchise approximately nine crore Indians, directly contradicting the Supreme Court’s call for “mass inclusion, not mass exclusion,” transforming electoral management from democratic participation into systematic voter suppression.

Legal challenges have also highlighted these concerns, but implementation continues while cases remain pending. That the constitutional courts are not adjudicating on electoral matters with the urgency they deserve has become a serious and persistent concern. The courts now routinely delay hearings in such matters, as if waiting for their implications to fully play out. Citizens need relief when their rights are being snatched away, not after the exercise is finished.

The ECI must accept widely used identity documents like Aadhaar cards. It must provide transparent appeals processes for excluded voters. The rushed timeline must be extended to allow proper verification and correction. Most importantly, the ECI must abandon this rushed special revision policy template before it wreaks havoc on our citizens elsewhere.

Democracy thrives on inclusion, not exclusion. Electoral integrity requires ensuring that legitimate voters can fully participate in the elections. Bihar’s Special Intensive Revision represents a fundamental departure from this principle. It must be resisted now, before this experiment in exclusion becomes the norm for Indian democracy. The stakes could not be higher.

The Special Intensive Revision exercise in Bihar is not just flawed — it is blatantly exclusionary. It denotes a constitutional fraud being perpetrated on the people, particularly the poor and marginalised, under the guise of electoral hygiene. Stripping citizens of their fundamental right to vote through opaque and selective processes is a betrayal of democratic values and a direct assault on the spirit of the Constitution.

The writer is the Leader of the Opposition Bihar Legislative Assembly