A rare and pointed judicial rebuke is building against India's Election Commission over its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, with both a former Supreme Court judge and a sitting one warning that the mass purging of voters threatens the constitutional foundations of Indian democracy. The criticism, delivered in New Delhi and other public forums in recent days, centers on the disenfranchisement of millions of citizens, including an estimated 9 million voters in West Bengal alone.

Former Supreme Court Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman said democracy itself is "in peril" because of what he described as the illegal removal of voters from electoral lists. He singled out West Bengal, where he said 90 lakh, or roughly 9 million, voters have been struck from the rolls, many without any meaningful avenue to contest their removal or seek justice.

Nariman's concerns extended beyond the immediate controversy to the structural question of how India's election commissioners are chosen in the first place. He called for reform of the appointment process, arguing that the current system leaves the Election Commission vulnerable to the perception, if not the reality, of partiality at precisely the moment when its independence matters most.

A Sitting Judge Adds His Voice

The criticism has not been confined to retired jurists. Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, speaking in his official capacity, described the SIR process as striking "at the heart of the Constitution." He said the exclusion of millions of citizens from voting rolls was "arbitrary" and fundamentally incompatible with constitutional principles, regardless of the administrative justifications offered by election authorities.

In unusually blunt language for a sitting judge, Bhuyan rejected what he called "whataboutery," attempts to defend the mass deletions by comparing them to other bureaucratic processes or precedents. He said no such comparison could excuse an action that, in practice, reduces millions of Indian citizens to what he termed second-class status within their own democracy.

No citizen should be denied the right to vote without due process, Justice Bhuyan said, stressing that the franchise is not a privilege to be administratively withdrawn but a right at the core of free and fair elections.

Why the Voter Rolls Matter

The Special Intensive Revision is an exercise conducted by India's Election Commission to update and verify electoral rolls, ostensibly to remove duplicate, deceased, or ineligible entries. But critics, now including members of the judiciary itself, argue the process has been applied with such breadth and so little procedural safeguard that it has swept up legitimate voters alongside any genuine errors.

West Bengal has become the flashpoint of this debate. The removal of an estimated 9 million names from the state's rolls, a figure large enough to alter the outcome of closely contested elections, has drawn attention not just from opposition politicians but now from the bench itself. Both Nariman and Bhuyan emphasized that those removed often had no real recourse: no clear notice, no accessible appeals mechanism, and little practical ability to prove their continued eligibility before elections are held.

A Deeper Institutional Question

The judicial criticism arrives at a moment when the independence of India's Election Commission has itself become a subject of political contention. Nariman's call to overhaul the appointment process for election commissioners reflects a broader unease about whether the institution charged with safeguarding the vote retains the autonomy to do so impartially.

India's modern electoral framework traces its legitimacy to a long and hard-won struggle over the right to vote itself. The colonial-era legislative councils restricted suffrage so severely that, as late as 1920, fewer than a million Indians could vote for the central legislature's lower house, and property and revenue qualifications ensured that the franchise remained the preserve of a narrow elite. Indian nationalists of that era, from the Congress to reform-minded Liberals, fought precisely against such exclusions, insisting that the right to self-government could not be rationed out by administrative fiat. The current controversy, judges argue, risks reviving by bureaucratic means a version of the exclusion that the independence movement itself was built to overcome.

For now, the SIR process continues, and the Election Commission has defended it as a necessary cleanup of flawed rolls. But with both a retired and a sitting Supreme Court judge publicly questioning its legality and fairness, the controversy is unlikely to recede quietly. Legal challenges are expected to test whether the process can withstand constitutional scrutiny, and whether millions of disenfranchised voters will be restored to the rolls before India's next major elections.