NEW DELHI: Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Manoj Jha on Sunday moved the Supreme Court challenging the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) decision to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, which heads to elections later this year.In his writ petition, Jha contended that the process is “not only hasty and ill-timed, but has the effect of disenfranchising crores of voters, thereby robbing them of their constitutional right to vote.”Jha’s petition claimed that the decision, taken without consultation with political parties, “is being used to justify aggressive and opaque revisions of electoral rolls that disproportionately target Muslim, Dalit and poor migrant communities. As such, they are not random patterns but are engineered exclusions.”Jha, a Rajya Sabha member from the RJD, told the court that the short deadlines render the entire process unreasonable and unworkable.The petition challenges the process as a violation of the principles laid down by the Supreme Court in Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer, (1995) 3 SCC 100, which held that deletions from electoral rolls must follow a fair and reasonable procedure.“The impugned order (ECI’s) is discriminatory, unreasonable and manifestly arbitrary and violates Articles 14, 21, 325, and 326. The impugned order dated 24-06-2025 is a tool of institutionalised disenfranchisement,” the petitioner stated.Questioning the rationale of initiating such an exercise in a state with a high number of migrant workers and illiterate citizens affected by poverty, Jha argued that conducting the process just months before the assembly elections is both illegal and arbitrary.“The 11 documents which are specified by the ECI to establish citizenship are not the kind of documents which poor and illiterate persons might possess,” Jha said, urging the court to quash the ECI’s SIR order.
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