SIR and Citizenship: 'You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise'

Picture a citizen who walks into a courtroom to reclaim the most ordinary of freedoms — the right to speak, to move about the country, to earn a living. Someone, somewhere, has decided that this person is no longer Indian, and with that stroke the freedoms have gone. The judge listens and asks a single question: what proof do you have that you are a citizen of India?

The person reaches for the one document that has always seemed to answer that question. "You have a passport," Justice Madan Lokur told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, walking his audience through exactly this scene, "but the judge says, sorry, the passport is a travel document, it is not a document of citizenship." The former Supreme Court judge let the silence do its work. "What is your answer? You don't have a single document to show that you are a citizen of India."

That courtroom is still hypothetical. But the machinery that could one day fill it was what a former Supreme Court judge, a former Election Commissioner, a former Union Home Secretary, a political scientist and a right-to-information campaigner had gathered to discuss, taking up the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls from very different directions. They arrived at more or less the same place: that the exercise has quietly reversed a founding assumption of the Republic. For seventy-five years, the state presumed you were a citizen, and had to prove otherwise. Now the burden has been flipped onto you.

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The presumption has been inverted

No one at the conclave named that reversal more precisely than Dr Niraja Jayal, a scholar of Indian citizenship. The Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955, she reminded the room, were built on the principle of unconditional jus soli — citizenship by birth on the soil. Underlying it was something simpler still: a presumption of belonging.

"The foundational conception of universal, equal citizenship in our Constitution," Jayal said, "was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship. That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced, as we speak, by a presumption of universal alienage."

Alienage — the presumption that a person is a foreigner until shown otherwise — was, in her account, the thread connecting a set of developments that are usually reported as separate stories.

 "It is the principle underlying the NRC. It is the principle underlying the SIR. It is also the principle underlying the latest salvo against passport holders." Each arrives dressed as something routine. "One day it is an amendment to the law on citizenship. Another day it is a new method for the routine task of revising electoral rolls. Yet another day it is a throwaway comment about whether passports constitute proof of citizenship or not. But all of these are tending towards the same purpose, the same objective — the presumption of alienage."

Who is asked to prove themselves, she argued, is not random. "Who gets the memo and who doesn't is, for the most part, a function of one's identity: religion, caste, class, gender, tribe." Occasionally the net catches someone it was not designed for — "a Black Swan event, such as the story of the journalist R. Rajagopal" — but for the most part, she said, "this is precision targeting."

Jayal traced the erosion through the amendments of 2003 and 2019, describing a long migration in the law "from unconditional jus soli … to conditional jus soli, to what we are now in, which is more or less jus sanguinis" — citizenship by descent, by blood. The consequence, she said, was a settling of citizenship "to the service of a majoritarian agenda," and its sharpest edge now falls on the rolls. "Up until now, one's registration as a voter was limited to determining one's eligibility to vote," she said. "Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual's citizenship status, and in determining their access to welfare provisioning."

That last shift — from the vote as a right, to the vote as a gate — is what she called the true inversion. "The relationship between citizenship and the vote has been inverted," Jayal said, "from citizenship being the condition of the vote, to the vote becoming an instrument for sifting citizens, for inclusion and exclusion, for casting doubt on the citizenship of citizens."

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A revision that 'defies logical explanation'

If Jayal supplied the frame, Ashok Lavasa supplied the view from inside the machine. A former Election Commissioner, he spoke as someone who has administered the very rolls now under revision — and he did not soften the assessment.

The Commission, he pointed out, has two tasks: to enrol electors, and to conduct free and fair elections. It has performed the first for seventy-five years without treating citizenship as something to be re-proven. He described the first electoral roll of 1950, drawn up before the 1951 census figures were even available, which nonetheless enrolled the overwhelming majority of eligible adults.

"In the absence of documents, the Election Commission, through its machinery, was able to enrol the maximum number of people," Lavasa said, citing the historian Ornit Shani's phrase for that early inclusiveness — "democratic imagination." His conclusion was a mirror image of Jayal's: "There was always a presumption of citizenship attached to whoever was around. And the identification of a non-citizen was an exception."

Against that long practice, he set the SIR notification of 24 June 2025. "To my mind, what has happened in that notification is something which defies logical explanation," he said. In Bihar, an electoral roll had been prepared through the normal legal process and published only in January 2025. "So, suddenly, less than six months down the line, there is a realisation that something is horribly wrong with the electoral roll."

The revision then split existing electors into those enrolled before and after 2003 — "all of them have been enrolled by following the same process," he noted — and introduced a word the Commission had, in his experience, never used in this context. "The Election Commission has never used the expression 'citizenship' while conducting a revision," Lavasa said. The law does allow a non-citizen to be excluded, he acknowledged, "but for that, somebody has to say that so-and-so is a non-citizen — and not only create suspicion, but produce evidence." That, he stressed, "is an exception, not the rule."

He returned repeatedly to a single unanswered question. The Supreme Court, in upholding the exercise, had accepted that there was "material on record" showing the rolls needed wholesale revision. "What is that material on record?" Lavasa asked. "We don't know. Nobody knows. At least, it is not in the public domain. I don't even think it is part of the court records."

If the stated purpose was to remove the ineligible, he said, then the public was owed a number: how many people had actually been found ineligible under Article 326, and how many referred to a Foreigners Tribunal as the court's own order required. "There is no data available in the public domain to show how many people have been deleted because they were ineligible."

He ended not with a statistic but with a story — a colonel of the Indian Army who telephoned to say his wife of fifty years had vanished from the rolls because a spelling of her father's name could not be reconciled with an older record. And then, a couplet by the poet Krishna Bihari Noor, which in translation runs: "I have been divided into so many parts that nothing of me is left in my own share."

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The questions the Election Commission will not answer

Where Lavasa asked what the Commission knew, Anjali Bhardwaj asked why it would not say. A right-to-information campaigner, she has filed question after question during the SIR, and collected the Commission's refusals to answer them.

The pattern, she argued, predates the SIR. She pointed to the Commission's long resistance to releasing Form 17C, the statutory record of votes cast at each booth, and to its decision, after the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered disclosure of certain election records, to amend the rules rather than comply.

When the Leader of the Opposition alleged manipulation of the rolls, she said, the Commission "hid behind technicalities," and its chief, asked for CCTV footage of polling stations, invoked "the privacy of the bahus and betis of the country." Bhardwaj was unsparing about the logic: "Clearly there was no concern about the privacy of women when the CCTV cameras were being installed."

On the SIR itself, she said, the Commission had launched an exercise touching the entire electorate "without offering any reason … and without any consultation." When activists filed RTI requests asking why, the reply, she said, was that "no information exists in material form." On appeal, the answer grew stranger still. "The Principal Secretary gave it in writing that the decision to hold the SIR had not been taken in the Election Commission," Bhardwaj said. "That begs the question: where was this decision taken? Was it taken in the BJP headquarters? Was it taken in the Ministry of Home Affairs?"

The figures she cited were her own, and large. Nearly 6.5 crore names, she said, had already been struck off, with estimates running towards 10 crore — a hundred million people. Many, she conceded, were the dead, the shifted or the duplicated. But others, she insisted, "were born here, we are citizens, we have documents to prove it," and had still been removed. In Bengal, she said, deletions in a large number of constituencies exceeded the winning margins in those seats — "so there is a huge question mark today over the Bengal election results." When those left off the rolls approached the courts, she said, the answer was that they could vote another time.

It is here that the other side of the ledger belongs. The Election Commission has consistently described the SIR as a constitutional duty, not an assault on it: an exercise to remove the deceased, the permanently shifted, duplicate entries and non-citizens, so that "eligible citizens are not left out." It has cast the revision as participative, with political parties invited to appoint booth-level agents.

And on 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the Bihar SIR, finding it within the Commission's statutory mandate and in consonance with the Representation of the People Act. That judgment — delivered, as Lavasa noted with some irony, on the death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru — is the legal ground on which the exercise now rolls out across the country. The conclave's speakers were not disputing the Commission's power to revise. They were disputing what the revision has been made to mean.

When the passport stops being proof

For Justice Lokur, the meaning had crystallised in a single official claim: that an Indian passport is "nothing but a travel document." He had gone back to the Passports Act of 1967 to test it. The preamble, he said, speaks of "the issue of passports and travel documents" — two distinct things, each separately defined. "Parliament does not make laws using superfluous words," he said. "To say that a passport is nothing but a travel document is a complete misreading." His verdict was flat: "A person who holds an Indian passport is a citizen of India. I think that should be very clear."

Follow the official claim to its end, he warned, and the passport collapses into something trivial. "The passport is effectively reduced to a ticket. Not even an airline ticket, but perhaps a bus ticket." He dismissed the argument that a rarely used provision allowing passports for certain non-citizens undoes the general rule, calling it, on the evidence available, "a dead letter."

Then he made the move that turned a documents dispute into a rights emergency. Some fundamental rights, he reminded the room, belong to everyone — the right to life under Article 21, equality under Article 14. But the freedoms of Article 19 — speech, movement, the right to a trade or profession — "are granted only to citizens."

Strip a person from the rolls, treat that as a mark against their citizenship, and those freedoms fall away with it. "So you have these 27 lakh, or 22 lakh, or 6.5 crore persons — whatever the figure — roaming around the country without the fundamental right to freedom of speech, to movement, to expression, to carrying on any business or occupation, because they are not citizens." His refusal to fix the number was itself telling: even from the chair, the scale of exclusion could only be guessed at.

The burden of proof, he argued, had been turned upside down. A "rebuttable presumption" of citizenship, properly understood, means the state must come forward and rebut it. "I don't have to prove that I am a citizen of India," Lokur said. "Whereas now, what has happened is that I have to prove that I am a citizen." He reserved his sharpest phrase for the Commission's expanding authority, borrowing a term the Constituent Assembly had used as a warning: Imperium in Imperio, a power within a power. "That is what the Election Commission is becoming today. Nobody can question it."

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The next turn of the wheel

If the SIR is the present, the census is the near future — and Gopal Pillai, a former Union Home Secretary who has overseen one, came to explain the machinery about to be set in motion. The 2027 census, he said, will be India's first digital count, its first to allow self-enumeration, and its first to record caste. Its data will feed two of the most consequential exercises in the Republic's political life: the reservation of seats for women, and the delimitation that will redraw the number of constituencies. "The number of constituencies will change," Pillai said, "and that itself has political implications, which the country will have to take care of when it happens."

His warning was about the caste count, but its logic rhymed with everything else that was said. Caste names, he explained, are not fixed; they shift with migration, with conversion, with the slow pull of Sanskritisation, so that any attempt to fix people into official categories will generate disputes.

The answer, he argued, was disclosure before decision. "It is so essential that there is a public debate, open, within the entire country, before this is done." The exercise, he said, was under way in the Ministry of Home Affairs, "but very little of it is still available to the general public." The refrain — a state machinery reclassifying who people are, without showing its working — was by now familiar.

Deconstruction before reconstruction

Jayal put it most starkly. Beneath the legal argument, she said, lay a purpose the separate controversies were converging upon: "to make Muslims into de jure second-class citizens." Their second-class status in daily life, she argued, had already been achieved; what remained was to write it into law. Before the country could talk of rebuilding, she said, it would have to reckon with what had been dismantled. "Before we can think about reconstruction … we may need to think about deconstruction — not in the sense in which literary theory uses the term, but in the sense of undoing the damage that has been done."

Lokur closed on accountability, drawing on two judgments he had read in the previous days — a man kept out of his own city for seven months on an externment order the Bombay High Court later found illegal, and a custodial death for which the Delhi High Court awarded compensation. The point, he said, was that a wrong quashed is not a wrong answered. "This entire controversy about the SIR — not being able to vote, not having fundamental rights, not getting welfare benefits — somebody has to be held accountable."

The speakers were careful to concede the Commission's power and the Supreme Court's endorsement of it. What they would not concede was the inversion beneath both — the quiet rewriting of a citizen into a suspect, obliged to produce papers for a status that was once simply presumed. Lavasa had reached, in the end, for a scene from an old film, in which a father demanding proof of a suitor's love is asked in return what proof he has that he is the girl's father. In a country now asking millions to prove what was never in question, the joke has stopped being funny.