New Delhi: The Election Commission of India (EC) has directed its ground-level officials to flag cases of “suspected foreign nationals” to the relevant authorities as part of the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls currently underway across multiple states.In a circular sent to state chief electoral officers on May 14, the EC has laid out the procedures to be followed during the exercise, PTI reported.Among other directives, it said electoral registration officers (EROs) must refer such cases to the competent authority under the Citizenship Act, 1955, adding that assistant EROs would be empowered to act independently in this regard.Further, in cases where electors fail to return enumeration forms, the EC has directed Booth Level Officers (BLOs) to determine a likely reason for the absence, whether the person has shifted, passed away, or is a duplicate entry, based on inquiries with neighbours.This isn’t the first time the commission has raised the foreign nationals issue. When Bihar’s SIR was being conducted last year, EC officials claimed field-level workers had identified individuals from Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar on the voter rolls. Those claims, however, were never backed up with any figures or documented evidence.Opposition parties at the time dismissed the assertion as a cover story for what they alleged was a politically motivated drive to purge voters who were not aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies.As the EC has issued this circular now, it is unclear on what basis some people will be flagged as “suspected foreign nationals” by the state-level poll officers.Also read: Can the Election Commission Decide Who Is a Citizen? Questions Abound After Supreme Court’s SIR OrderNotably, the Supreme Court upheld the EC’s power to conduct the SIR exercise on May 27, nine months after the commission announced it ahead of Bihar’s November 2025 assembly elections, and six months after the polls ended. Further, the apex court had directed the commission to forward, within four weeks, the names of persons deleted from electoral rolls on grounds of doubtful citizenship to the Union government.As reported by The Wire, the judgement has raised concerns about how the disenfranchisement of over five crore voters now carries the Supreme Court’s stamp of approval, how the order will be used to implement the Union government’s “detect, delete, deport” policy, and why the court left more questions unanswered than it resolved.When asked if the EC is empowered to determine citizenship, Faizan Mustafa, vice chancellor of Chanakya National University, told The Wire, “The judgment is very legalistic,” adding, “True, it has correctly interpreted the law by applying classical positivistic rules of interpretation, where you go by the black letter of law, but it has not taken into account the harsh ground realities, which I am sure the petitioners must have presented to it.”Also read: ‘Demographic Change’ Committee Minus a Demographer? Why Sole Focus on Illegal Immigration is a ProblemThe third phase of the SIR exercise was launched on May 14, covering 16 states and three Union Territories with a combined electorate of approximately 367.3 million voters, with the enumeration phase beginning May 30. The states and Union Territories covered include Delhi, Odisha, Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, Telangana, Punjab, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Nagaland, Tripura, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Daman and Diu. Of these, Punjab, Jharkhand, Karnataka and Telangana are governed by opposition parties.Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh have been left out of the current schedule – the EC said timing for those regions would be announced separately, given snowbound conditions.The SIR process was mired in controversies in West Bengal as 2.7 million voters were left to wait for their fate to be decided by 19 judicial tribunals less than two weeks before polls, with even the Supreme Court refusing to grant interim relief. The tribunals eventually decided on a minuscule number of cases before polling day.