Tejasvi Yadav, leader of the opposition in the Bihar state assembly, has warned that the opposition alliance in the state may boycott the upcoming assembly elections. He accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “working at the behest” of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government.
This is the first time in recent years that any major political party has threatened to boycott elections.
Yadav, who has the backing of India’s main opposition party, the Congress, alleged that the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls to verify the citizenship of voters in Bihar is a “conspiracy of the NDA to get favorable results in the poll.”
“If they (NDA) want to win elections through fraudulent means, then what is the point in conducting elections? Chunav mat karwao (don’t hold the elections),” he said.
In recent years, opposition parties and civil society organizations have repeatedly alleged that the ECI has compromised its autonomy and integrity. The Modi government changed the law to bring the appointment of election commissioners under the government’s control — a move the top court is still examining for constitutionality. Meanwhile, those appointed as election commissioners have been known to be close to the Modi government.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a retired bureaucrat, had worked closely with Home Minister Amit Shah for years before his appointment to the ECI. His appointment as chief election commissioner in February 2025 triggered a big controversy.
Additionally, the ECI’s latest move to verify the citizenship of voters through the SIR first in Bihar and then in other states has brought the opposition parties into direct confrontation with the poll panel.
The conflict started on June 24 when the ECI issued a notification announcing the SIR. It said that apart from fixing errors like duplication of names, removal of names of dead voters, and correcting exclusion of legitimate voters, the exercise was required to remove names of “foreign illegal immigrants” figuring in the existing list.
The ECI’s move to weed out “foreign illegal immigrants” from the voter list, curiously, coincides with the ongoing citizenship screening drive being undertaken by the police in different BJP-ruled states. During these drives, being conducted under instructions from the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), the police are rejecting Aadhaar, voter ID, PAN (taxpayer’s identity card), and food ration cards as proof of one’s nationality.
Now, the ECI, too, has said that Aadhaar, voter ID, and ration cards — three of the most widely used government-issued identity documents in India — cannot be accepted as proof of one’s eligibility as a voter, as the documents are “not reliable.”
Coincidence or Convergence?
The ECI’s verification of voters’ citizenship is a novel move. The exercise’s opponents petitioned against it in the Supreme Court, alleging that the SIR exercise can disenfranchise millions of voters, as papers the election body has sought are not often available to marginalized sections of society. Even the ECI has said that around 6 million voters’ names may be deleted from Bihar’s electoral list.
While hearing a batch of petitions on July 10, the top court observed that citizenship screening is the MHA’s domain and ascertaining voters’ identity should suffice for the ECI to prepare an error-free electoral roll.
However, the ECI argued that Article 326 of the Constitution empowers them to verify citizenship.
The judges also pointed to the ECI’s list of 11 documents for verification of voters and said that, in their prima facie view, “since the list is not exhaustive, it would be in the interest of justice for ECI to consider Aadhaar, EPIC, issued by the ECI itself, and ration card.”
“This issue is very important. It goes to the very roots of our democracy. It is about the right to vote,” one of the judges observed. The court repeatedly questioned the ECI’s arguments for excluding Aadhaar from the list of documents.
The court told the ECI to consider accepting voter ID, Aadhaar, and ration cards as supporting documents, noting that they are widely used and accepted by the government and that the window for completing the exercise in Bihar was “very short.”
However, in its July 21 submission before the apex court, the ECI reiterated its position. It said in its affidavit that it “is fully competent to require a person claiming citizenship by birth to produce relevant documents for inclusion in the electoral roll,” independent news portal Reporters’ Collective reported.
It argued that even a law passed by the Parliament cannot take away its power to verify citizenship, as the power is provided in the Constitution.
While hearing the case briefly on July 28, the top court refused to stay the ECI’s planned publication of the draft electoral roll on August 1. However, the bench reiterated its verbal advice to the ECI to consider at least the statutory documents of Aadhaar and voter ID.
“There’s (a) presumption of correctness with official documents… you proceed with these two documents. You will include these two documents,” Live Law quoted a judge as saying. The court opined that incidents of forgery can be dealt with on a case-to-case basis. “Any document on the earth can be forged,” a judge was quoted as telling the ECI’s counsel.
The Congruence
Migrant workers from the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, who have borne the brunt of the citizenship screening drives in BJP-ruled states, are convinced that the two exercises — the police action of randomly screening any suspect’s citizenship and ECI’s move to revise voters’ lists — are linked.
Asif Farook, who heads the West Bengal-based Parijaye Shramik Aikya Mancha (migrant workers’ united forum), a volunteer organization of migrant workers, told The Diplomat that they repeatedly asked the police in different states to clarify why Aadhaar, voter ID, PAN, and ration cards were not being accepted. But they got no answer.
“Now, we can see that the police had been asking for those very documents that the ECI has listed,” he said. “The ECI and the cops in BJP-ruled states are clearly on the same page.”
Over the past few years, Modi and Shah have repeatedly said that a nationwide citizenship screening drive will be carried out after Hindu migrants from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors are granted citizenship through the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, which was implemented in March 2024.
Amid the Bihar SIR controversy, CEC Kumar said that allowing ineligible people to vote, first in Bihar and later across the country, is against the Constitution. He argued that “going beyond political ideologies,” all Indians “will have to think deeply” on questions like whether foreigners and people with duplicate voter ID cards should be allowed to vote.
Speaking to The Diplomat, Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the CPI(ML)(Liberation), one of the key components of the opposition alliance in Bihar, said that if the ECI disputes the credibility of the voter list used for the 2024 parliamentary election, then the election itself gets discredited.
He alleged that the ECI had “misplaced facts and used statistics in a misleading way” in its affidavit before the Supreme Court. The ECI’s claim of people having no shortage of documents “defies credibility,” he said.
“The ECI is being very brazen about their approach, but the people of Bihar are not going to give up their right to vote. They are not going to let go of it, regardless of the outcome of the legal battle in court,” Bhattacharya warned.
