Harsh Mander: Hollowed-out EC has shrunk Indian democracy further with Bihar voter roll revision

The Election Commission was for seven decades the paramount arbiter and defender of India’s universal suffrage, trusted widely by millions of Indian voters. Its credibility, however, has been mortally dented in the last decade.

Yet even by the commission’s now severely diminished standards, it hit a new low with its abrupt and precipitous decision to undertake a “special intensive revision” of the electoral rolls of the state of Bihar. Even though the rolls were reviewed as recently as January 2025, it prescribed, with just months left for the polls, an unprecedented process that required at least 29 out of nearly 79 million Bihari voters to prove that they and in many cases their parents were Indian citizens.

This has thrust millions precipitously into the sudden dread of targeted disenfranchisement and statelessness, of detention centres and forced expulsion from the country of their birth.

These orders of the Election Commission not just break precedent but also the constitutional boundaries to its authority that are laid down in the law and repeatedly clarified and reiterated by the courts. The first of these are the principles that the Election Commission is authorised to investigate and verify a voter’s identity but not her citizenship, that if a person’s name...

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