Assam’s SIR exemption ahead of 2026 election is a warning for the rest of India

On December 9, the Supreme Court issued notice to the Election Commission on a writ petition challenging why Assam alone had been exempted from the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.

The Special Intensive Revision being conducted across India requires election officials to re-verify voter identity, documents and records to “purify” the electoral rolls by removing duplicate entries and the names of “illegal immigrants”.

In Bihar, for instance, this resulted in 47 lakh names being deleted from the rolls.

But the petition in the Supreme Court about Assam brought into focus an impression that many have had: that the special intensive revision is not a routine administrative exercise. Instead, it signals a shift in how citizenship, identity and political belonging are being reorganised in India.

Of all the states in India, Assam is where citizenship has been most intensely contested for decades. As a consequence, it would be expected that this stringent special intensive revision of the voter rolls would be conducted most rigorously there.

Instead, the state will undergo only a milder “special revision”, where Booth Level Officers, who update entries on the electoral rolls, will arrive at homes with pre-filled registers to identify duplicate entries – without requiring voters to establish their citizenship with documentation.

A state built on verification

Assam is the only state where Indian citizenship has been examined repeatedly, through a variety of tools created expressly for the purpose. This was the consequence of the Assam Movement between 1979 and 1985, which demanded that “foreigners” be deleted from the voter rolls. The movement claimed that millions of immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh had been granted Indian citizenship.

The agitation resulted in the creation of Section 6A of the Citizenship Act – a provision that applies only to Assam. It says that anyone who entered the state after midnight on March 24, 1971, as the Bangladesh liberation movement intensified, must be treated as a foreigner unless they can prove that they or their ancestors lived in Assam before that date.

To enforce this regime, the Election Commission in 1997 introduced the category of “D-voters” or “doubtful voters”, which allows the authorities to bar people from voting until they prove their citizenship. Their cases are then sent to Foreigners Tribunals, special courts created in Assam to decide who is Indian.

All of this culminated in 2019 with the publication of the updated National Register of Citizens, a massive exercise of a list that exists only in Assam. Every resident had to produce family documents establishing that they or their families had lived in the state before 1971. When the register was published, 19 lakh people were excluded.

Given this history of scrutiny, one would expect Assam to undergo the most thorough examination of its electoral rolls.

Why has the burden of proof been tightened elsewhere but softened only in Assam? The answer lies in Assam’s political landscape after the updated National Register of Citizens was published.

Political risk

The publication of the updated register caused a political shock in Assam. The Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise in Assam was predicated on stoking anxieties about Muslim “infiltators” and reassuring Hindu migrants that they would not be labelled as “outsiders”.

It turned out that only seven lakh of the 19 lakh excluded names were Muslim. The rest, Assam Chief Minister Himata Biswa Sarma admitted, were Hindu – including Bengali Hindus, Assamese Hindus and Gorkhas, communities that the BJP actively courted.

A stringent special intensive revision in Assam today would require the Election Commission to reconcile the current voter rolls with the exclusions from the National Register of Citizens. This could place thousands – perhaps even lakhs — of voters from the ruling party’s core support base at risk of being questioned or removed months before the 2026 Assembly election.

Assam’s exemption from the special intensive revision does not reflect confidence in its rolls but the political cost of reexamining the National Register of Citizens deletions.

Verification standards

The implications of Assam’s exemption from the special intensive revision extend far beyond the state. It demonstrates that the revision is no longer being conducted uniformly. It appears to be calibrated depending on the political consequences of deletions. Where deletions do not threaten ruling-party arithmetic, verification is strict. Where strictness may unsettle political alignments, verification softens.

Assam reveals a deeper truth about the future of democratic belonging in India. The presumption of citizenship is weakening for many, who must repeatedly prove their identity. This burden falls heavily on migrant workers, linguistic minorities, flood-affected communities and others with fragile documentation trails.

When voters in some states must produce documents, match names with older rolls and justify entries that have existed for decades but Assam is not required to do any of this, it is clear that verification is not a matter of ensuring electoral credibility. It is being shaped by political convenience.

That is a warning the rest of India cannot afford to ignore.

Sahil Hussain Choudhury is a lawyer and Constitutional Law Researcher based in New Delhi. His X handle is @SahiHChoudhury, his Instagram handle is @voxjuris_ and his Linkedin profile is Sahil Hussain Choudhury.