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New Delhi: The Constitutional Conduct Group, a group of 181 former civil servants of the All India and Central Services, along with the Group on Federalism and Elections, of over 70 eminent citizens, have released a statement noting that India’s electoral democracy faces a grave crisis due to the manipulation of electoral rolls through the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process.

The following is their public statement. 

Never before in the history of our Republic has the trust reposed by the People in our electoral system been shaken so rudely, brazenly, and with such ruthless impunity. The recent elections to the West Bengal Vidhan Sabha revealed grave dysfunctionalities and abdication of responsibility within the two institutions constitutionally mandated to be the custodians of that trust: the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the Supreme Court. 

This democratic trust was built painstakingly over several decades of robust democratic practice. Until recently, successive ECs contributed to streamlining systems, learning from experience, introducing technological innovations, and communicating transparently with all stakeholders. That collective effort now stands negated and marginalised. The foundational concept of universal adult franchise, upon which the architecture of our electoral democracy rests, has been damaged wilfully and wantonly. The trust that existed stands broken. 

The Subversion of Electoral Rolls 

In breaking this trust, a diabolical stratagem was introduced by the ECI and subsequently legitimised by the Supreme Court. The ECI weaponized its lawful constitutional authority to introduce unnecessarily convoluted processes that enabled large-scale manipulations of the Electoral Rolls. These processes – particularly the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – had no precedent, no clear basis in law, and no verified necessity. To this day, there has been no explanation from the ECI for placing reliance on an arbitrarily designed algorithm with a set of irrational criteria to flag “logical discrepancies” in the electoral roll entries of voters and effectively disenfranchising millions of them. There was no reason to abandon the time-tested, continuously refined procedures that had made the ECI an internationally recognised repository of best practices. Historically, these efforts ensured that........

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