In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt refers to citizenship as “the right to have rights”. The absence of citizenship deprives one of not just the right to vote and access entitlements, but also of the very foundation to claim them. The Supreme Court’s judgment on the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter lists in Bihar in 2025 (Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India), delivered on May 27, 2026, must be read and critiqued in this light.On the surface, the judgment, amongst other questions, was concerned with whether the Election Commission (EC) had constitutional and statutory powers to conduct the SIR in Bihar. The court has upheld it. Yet embedded within the judgment is an issue with far-reaching consequences: its direction that all persons deleted from the 2003 Bihar SIR on grounds of ‘doubt’ be referred to the “Competent Authority” under the Citizenship Act, 1955, for a determination of their citizenship status.In doing so, the Supreme Court has potentially subjected lakhs of people to a citizenship trial.The 2003 SIR: an arbitrary baselineThe EC used the 2003 SIR as the eligibility “base year” for inclusion in the 2025 SIR. Individuals whose names had appeared in this eligibility list did not need to furnish any document; those who could not be traced to it were required to produce any document from a prescribed list.The court accepted this classification in favour, on the ground that the 2003 SIR was the product of an intensive revision and thus enjoyed a “higher degree of reliability”. The court, while accepting the ‘2003 SIR’ as the baseline, has in practice rendered all subsequent inclusions in the state’s electoral rolls as ‘irrelevant’.What this means is that everyone deleted from the 2003 SIR list in Bihar on the ground of ‘citizenship under doubt’ will have to face a citizenship determination process.Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.Take, for instance, a migrant worker from a remote district in Bihar who is working in another state and was deleted from the 2003 SIR due to a lack of proper documentation. For 22 years, the EC did not act on that exclusion. The state acknowledged his continuous citizenship. But now, this deletion from the 2003 rolls – a sheer bureaucratic accident – becomes the basis for referring him to the Competent Authority to determine whether he is a citizen.Echoes of the Assam NRCThe Supreme Court has opened a Pandora’s box by referring all excluded individuals to the Competent Authority, raising an uncomfortable parallel with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam.The Assam NRC, which used a different cut-off date, had placed the burden of proving citizenship on individuals. The exercise resulted in mass exclusion, leaving lakhs in limbo over their citizenship status.The Supreme Court’s order means that the citizenship status of ‘deleted’ individuals would next be governed by the mechanism set out under the Citizenship Act, 1955, and the newly enacted Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025. The burden of proof will shift squarely onto the individual. This phenomenon, from the presumption of citizenship to the presumption of doubt, is the defining feature of the Assam experience and is now likely to be institutionalised in Bihar.Statelessness crisisThe judgment crafts a referral mechanism of enormous consequence while remaining silent on its ripple effects. What happens if a genuine voter gets deleted from the SIR? The court says this will not affect their “claims of citizenship”. But if the Competent Authority formally holds a person to be a non-citizen, the legal outcome is statelessness.Equally absent is any consideration of the cascading effect on descendants. Individuals and their descendants who were enrolled after 2003 were not required to re-establish their parental details, provided their names or their parents’ names could be traced to the 2003 list. For those who were deleted from the 2003 rolls, however, the entire family tree comes under the shadow of the referral.Proportionality over due processThe court upheld the 2025 SIR as proportionate. It conducted a four-part proportionality analysis using the following criteria: a) legitimate purpose, b) rational nexus, c) least restrictive option and d) fair balance. On each, it has ruled in favour of the EC.While the judgment acknowledges that 47 lakh names were ultimately deleted, the court fails to examine the demographic distribution of those deletions – which districts, which communities, which constituencies bore the heaviest burden of exclusion. Without that data, the proportionality finding is a statistical average applied to a politically non-neutral exercise.Notably, lakhs of voters were deleted from the 2025 SIR roll, yet no appeal was filed against the final list. By treating this absence of appeals as evidence that “the SIR was fairly and transparently implemented”, the court has turned its back on grassroots realities.Instead, it should have asked: why did those individuals not challenge their exclusion? Possible answers include poverty, illiteracy, migration, paucity of legal aid and a practical unfamiliarity with the administrative process.A missed opportunity for strict judicial scrutinyAs the EC announced an SIR in 19 states and UTs, this judgment has far-reaching effects. Nearly two-thirds of India’s electorate has to undergo a fresh SIR scrutiny. A judgment of this stature should have recognised several ground realities.First, the fact that re-enrolment in successive rolls post-2003 is in itself evidence of continuous eligibility.Second, the Citizenship Act, 1955, contains no special mechanism for determining citizenship prompted by one’s exclusion from the SIR roll. Here, the Supreme Court has initiated a legal proceeding that neither parliament intended nor the executive requested.Third, the right to vote, according to the Supreme Court itself, is acknowledged to have been “upgraded from being a mere statutory right to a constitutional right” (In Re: Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 2024). Surely, a constitutional right demands a stricter judicial review than what the court applied here.The Bihar SIR judgment will be remembered not for what it held about the EC’s powers, which was perhaps necessary, but for what it created beyond: a citizenship tribunal waiting to happen. The persons whose names were deleted from a 22-year-old electoral roll now face the most terrifying question a democracy can ask to one of its own: prove that you belong here.Arendt would have recognised this moment. When the state begins asking its citizens to prove their citizenship, it has already begun the process of making them aliens.Abdullah Ghazali teaches law at Presidency University, Bengaluru. He writes and researches on Labour and Citizenship.This excerpt was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.