It is said that democracy begins not at the ballot box, but at the very moment when we ask, “who gets to vote?”

In India’s Bihar, that question has ignited a political firestorm. The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls–ostensibly a bureaucratic chore–has become a contested battleground, with opposition leaders decrying it as “institutionalized vote theft.”

The SIR, announced in June 2025, was pitched as a clean-up of voter lists that had grown messy over two decades of urbanization and migration.

Scheduled to conclude with the final electoral roll by September 30, 2025, it involved house-to-house verification, enumeration forms and rigorous documentation–even requiring citizens to prove their birth, citizenship, and parentage–a far cry from the routine summary revisions of yesteryear.

On its face, the logic was sturdy: weed out duplicate or deceased entries, include first-time voters, and ensure that ineligible names–perhaps even non-citizens–have no place in Bihar’s ballot.

It conformed to Section 21 of the Representation of the People Act, supported by Article 324 of the Constitution, which charges the Election Commission with “full control” over elections.

But the opposition saw something darker: a preemptive mine laid beneath the state’s electoral foundation. Rahul Gandhi led the charge, denouncing the SIR as “institutionalized chori”--vote theft, a way to deprive the poor and vulnerable of their franchise.

In protests that drew hundreds of MPs to New Delhi, the INDIA bloc marched toward the Election Commission this Monday. Police halted them. Leaders including Gandhi and Priyanka were briefly detained.

They insisted their protest was not political posture, but a fight to protect constitutional democracy.

The CPI-ML, too, denounced the SIR as “daylight robbery,” referencing their discovery of anomalies in the voter list.

These include sudden surges in entries flagged as “probably deceased” or “permanently shifted,” unexplained drops in voter counts, and–most unsettling of all–the disappearance of some 6.5 million registered voters, according to EC affidavits in the Supreme Court.

Yet the EC has not published detailed justification or documentation.

Why is SIR not well-received?

For many in Bihar–especially migrants, marginalized communities, and first-time or low-literacy voters–this is way more than just the hurdles of some legal technicalities.

It is a fearful sense that their right to vote is being eroded. Allegations have even surfaced involving Bihar’s Deputy Chief Minister, who reportedly held two voter IDs in different constituencies.

The question many asked was that was this a case of bureaucratic confusion–or something more deliberate enabled by an opaque revision process?

The Election Commission has pushed back. It called the “vote-chori” claims factually incorrect and published video testimonials and draft-roll documents showing that political parties–including Congress, RJD, and the Left–were involved in the process.

The EC insists transparency has been upheld. Nevertheless, it has not published the deleted voter lists publicly, a point of persistent opposition outrage.

Legal scrutiny has only further sharpened the debate. The Supreme Court, on July 10, recommended the EC consider commonly held documents such as Aadhaar, voter ID, and ration cards for verification–making the exercise less exclusionary.

Yet the SC did not overturn the SIR itself, upholding that the EC acted within its constitutional authority.

Behind the legalese lies a simpler calculation for the ruling BJP coalition: Bihar may decide the direction of national politics. For the opposition, even an expertly engineered voter list–a list cleaner on paper but perhaps manipulated in practice–is a preemptive victory for the incumbent.

Hence, Rahul Gandhi’s claim of “criminal evidence” of vote fraud, once reserved for Karnataka’s faulty voter rolls, is now focused on Bihar.

The opposition’s demands are not radical: release the deleted names and their reasons for removal, allow easier documentation options, halt the revision in contentious areas, and restore faith in the process.

These seem modest asks in a democracy–yet without them, the SIR risks eroding trust even before votes are cast. Democracies live on two pillars: the vote and the voter. In Bihar, the second pillar is seemingly under strain.

The SIR’s lofty ambition–to clean and modernize–is not inherently wrong. But when it becomes a tool for the disenfranchised to be silently struck off, it starts to feel like the shadow of “winning without contest” looms too large.

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Md Sazzad Amin is Bangla Outlook’s chief geopolitical columnist