Bihar Assembly Election 2025: The suspense over the final voter roll for Bihar ended on Wednesday when the Election Commission of India (ECI) made public the list after three months of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar. The exercise, conducted after a gap of 22 years, witnessed objections, campaigns, hearing and what not – and the outcome is here. Bihar now has 7.42 crore eligible voters who would exercise their franchise in the upcoming assembly elections.
The number is 47 lakh less from what the list had on June 24, 2025, when the ECI announced the SIR in the state. This has now cleared the way for the election commission to go ahead with Bihar poll schedule. While the mass disenfranchisement of voters claim did not hold any ground, the campaign done by the opposition, individuals and civil society along with Supreme Court’s orders and media reports – the ground level checks seem to have been ensured, at least the outcome suggests so.
Why was the SIR done?
Throughout his campaigns, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reiterated that illegal immigrants have taken the rights of an Indian citizen, severely impacting the resource distribution, opportunities and more. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), during the entire time when the SIR was being done, blamed the opposition for saving immigrants, ‘Bangladeshis’.
It reiterated that the NDA government-led by the BJP, won’t let this happen, and backed this with the wave of nationalism in Bihar.
The sole reason for conducting the SIR was to remove illegal voters from the list, on whose names fraud may happen. This included illegal immigrants, voters who have died, and those who have migrated among others. The ECI declared to conduct the exercise on June 24 and the filling of enumeration forms began the next day.
A number of instructions were given to the voters, booth level officers (BLOs) were given tasks to monitor and guide citizens. And so began the confusions too. With only three months for Bihar elections, the timing seemed less with so much to be done. One month deadline was set to fill the forms for Bihar voters, and objections were to be filed in August, followed by final checks in September.
A routine revision of voter roll takes place every year or at least every time election is held in a state. A routine clean-up keeps the voters list robust ensuring free and fair elections. However, this time in Bihar, the ECI asked the voters to prove their citizenship (which was not the clause during the last SIR in the state in 2003). There were 11 documents that one could bring to prove the same, and it did not have Aadhaar card.
As for the scale of the exercise, the ECI said it could only be done by sincere efforts of Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Bihar, District Election Officers (DEOs) of all 38 districts, 243 Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), 2,976 Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs), around 1 lakh Booth Level Officers (BLOs), lakhs of volunteers and the full involvement of all the 12 major Political Parties , including their district presidents and over 1.6 lakh Booth Level Agents (BLAs) appointed by them.
The SIR: Objections, case, and SC orders
The opposition began campaigning against the SIR calling it a “vote theft” exercise by the ECI. Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and RJD leader Tejashwi Yadavi led the “vote chori” rallies and the issued even saw protests in parliament during the monsoon session.
A presser by the CED Gyanesh Kumar to address the allegations of the opposition parties did not give a clear picture. Rather, the press conference raised many questions on the mode of the SIR and EC’s response to the those raising questions rather than attempt to address the same.
A batch of petitions were filed in the top court, which heard the arguments at length. Though the court did not stay the exercise, but questioned the timing. The ECI justified that a large number of forms were already filled by the team petitions were filed and the process will be completed by September 30, as per the deadline.
The SC noted the same, but ordered the poll panel to consider Aadhaar in the list of documents as ’12th document’, which the ECI was against.
Bihar SIR final roll
The final SIR was published a scheduled on Sept 30, even though the apex court will hear the final arguments on October 7. The draft roll in August had 65 lakh names less, which the SC asked the ECI to publish so as to make people aware and give them an opportunity to make objection.
In the run-up to the final roll, 3.66 lakh more names were deleted while 21.53 lakhs eligible voters were added or re-added. Overall, the final draft roll now has 7.42 crore voters, an effective reduction of 47 lakh voters from the EC’s June 24 voter roll that had 7.89 crore voters.
Now, the ongoing analysis of these deletions region and constituency wise would provide the clear picture. As of now, nearly all the constituencies have seen an overall reduction in the number of voters. The opposition is yet to come out with some kind of detailed result from the SIR.
Meanwhile, the ECI is also preparing for a nationwide SIR and the Bihar example is what they should consider as learning.