The prescience of Sandhu’s warning became evident during the rollout in Bihar, which concluded on September 30. The exercise led to widespread panic, with voters scrambling to procure birth certificates and old land records. The electorate in Bihar reportedly shrank by 6% following the revision. The EC also had to extend deadlines following reports of the deaths of several Booth Level Officers (BLOs) due to the intense workload.
Electoral Systems
Today, December 9, 2025, the Lok Sabha holds a crucial discussion on “electoral reforms”. Central to this debate is the proposal for One Nation, One Election (ONOE). While the government frames this as a matter of administrative efficiency – citing financial savings, the prevention of “policy paralysis”, and reduced voter “fatigue” – the counter-argument suggests these are alibis rather than justifications.
Analysed through a federalist lens, the proposal appears as a project of political engineering designed to strip away the mask of “good governance” and convert the diverse, federal Union of India into a unitary monolith. The concern is that this politics aims to flatten the multi-layered Indian voter into a singular consumer of a nationalised leader’s image.
the resistance to ONOE is not about time, but about power. The proposal seems to be an attempt to bypass the states, insulate the Executive, and centralise the narrative. If passed, the republic risks transforming into a manageable corporation where voters are shareholders allowed to attend the Annual General Meeting once every five years, but barred from speaking in the interim.
by pavan Korada
11/12/2025
The SIR exercise, which began with Bihar and has since expanded to other states, requires existing electors to fill out enumeration forms and provide additional documents to prove their eligibility.
IE reports that on June 24, the day the order was issued, commissioner Sandhu wrote a dissenting note. “Care should be taken that genuine voters/citizens, particularly old, sick, PwD (persons with disabilities), poor and other vulnerable groups do not feel harassed and are facilitated,” Sandhu wrote. https://thewire.in/government/harassment-fears-deleted-citizenship-clause-inside-the-election-commissions-sir-d
by Pavan Korada
04/12/2025
Two booth-level officers (BLOs) from Uttar Pradesh and one from Rajasthan died in the past three days – their families citing increased workload amid the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls underway across 12 states and Union Territories.
Several such cases of BLO deaths have come to light in recent months, with opposition parties questioning the government and the Election Commission (EC) over their apathy towards the plight of the ground-level workers.
01/12/2025
The Supreme Court on Tuesday (November 11) took charge of the legal battle over the Election Commission’s nationwide special intensive revision of electoral rolls, issuing a notice to the poll body and halting all related cases in the country’s high courts.
https://thewire.in/law/supreme-court-takes-over-sir-dispute-halts-high-court-cases
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi heard lawyers for political parties and Association for Democratic Rights (ADR) argue that the process was impractical, rushed and unconstitutional. The top court will hear the case on November 26 and has ordered the ECI to respond.
The hearing saw sharp exchanges over the voter revision’s timing, the ECI’s authority and the right to vote itself.
11/11/2025
https://thewire.in/rights/deleted-by-design-the-institutional-disenfranchisement-of-women-in-bihar
In Bihar, democracy has long worn a distinctly feminine face. In the 2020 assembly elections, women’s turnout was 59.7%, while men’s was 54.6% – marking the third election in a row where female turnout exceeded male turnout in the state. In the same election, women outpolled men in 167 out of 243 constituencies.
This pattern extends beyond state polls. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in Bihar as well, women pulled ahead: their turnout being around 59.45%, compared to men at about 53%. The trend of women leading in electoral participation is not a fluke but a structural feature of Bihar’s recent politics. Against this backdrop, the SIR’s disproportionate removal of women from the rolls doesn’t merely shrink numbers – it targets the very group that has historically turned out with strength, frequently swung margins, and shaped agendas.
Even before the revision, Bihar’s women were underrepresented in its electorate. On Jan 1, 2025, the roll had 914 women per 1,000 men, already below Bihar’s census ratio of 918. After SIR, that slid to just 894:1000. This translates to the fact that women constitute 59.7% of the reduction in the electorate from January 2025 to September 2025, with districts like Gopalganj, Madhubhani and Kishanganj seeing the largest proportion of deleted women electors.
The roots of this disproportionate exclusion lie in the texture of women’s lives and the structural vulnerabilities that surround documentation.
by Himanshi Yadav and Madhav Deepak
27/10/2025
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