Supreme Court and the SIR: An Analysis of Association for Democratic Reforms v Election Commission of India

This article examines the Supreme Court’s judgement in Association for Democratic Reforms & Others v. Election Commission of India delivered on 27 May 2026 as a post facto validation of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI). We argue that by affirming an exceptional exercise of preparing the electoral roll de novo, the Supreme Court has interpreted the ECI’s constitutional mandate in a way which has the potential to set boundaries to the right of citizens to vote. By deciding that the ongoing modality of revising the electoral roll is constitutional, the Supreme Court has confirmed the mutation of a process designed to give material form to the democratic ideal of universal suffrage into a politically charged practice. In this shift, the electoral roll has been transformed into a political artefact embedded in a politics of non-citizenship and banal statism, whereby the political regime manoeuvres the bureaucratic apparatus of the state to make the right to vote dependent on identification regimes devised by the state.