SIR may be dead without an announcement

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While the protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar is petering out, there is no sign of him actually resigning. Does it mean that the mobilisation against the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has failed? Does it mean that the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the BJP-led Central government have escaped this round of popular protests unscathed?

The clear indication is that like in the case of the NEET agitation that led to the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, popular mobilisation has led to a significant reversal of the state policy. There are enough reasons available to argue that the SIR, for all practical purposes, has been withdrawn by the ECI in the face of protests and a renewed challenge in the Supreme Court. There is no conclusive decision in the Supreme Court, the proceedings so far signalled enough trouble for Mr. Kumar, who has made several changes in the process, accounting for public concerns. There is no declaration that the SIR has been stopped or withdrawn, as has been demanded by the protesters. However, a series of recent decisions announced by the ECI has made the SIR redundant.

This does not mean that the Centre or the ECI will not try to reintroduce the controversial aspects of the SIR in some form or other in the future.

The ongoing SIR is different from the last such exercise conducted between 2002 and 2004 as it shifted the burden of proof on individual citizens and residents of the country who were required to present documentation to prove their citizenship. The point to note here is that there is no single document of citizenship that is available with anyone in India. There were proposals for the creation of a nationwide National Register of Citizens (NRC), which has been stuck in a political stalemate for several years. Only the Union Home Ministry has the power to determine and certify the citizenship of anyone.

In the absence of such a register or a citizenship card in India, the ECI set out to test the citizenship eligibility of all residents of the country through this SIR by introducing several controversial steps into this round of SIR. If you want to know how this round of SIR is different from the SIR which was done in 2002, read this article by a former IS officer, R. Rangarajan.

Now to the five reasons why I think SIR is dead for all practical purposes, at least for now.

The most clear-cut sign of surrender was the ECI’s abrupt and quiet deletion of the controversial ‘Special Declaration’ from the online Form 6 registration portal on October 13-14, 2026. The ECI had unilaterally altered the statutory form to force new voters to map their lineage or prove citizenship. Critics argued the ECI had overstepped its constitutional mandate by bypassing Parliament, and now the poll body unanimously withdrew the declaration.