RIGHT TO VOTE IS RIGHT TO LIFE WITH DIGNITY

 

    The Supreme Court has held that ‘Access to internet by Children is a FundamentalRight under the Constitution. 

    Right to Education itself was upheld as a Fundamental Right and made a part of Right to Life as per the Judgement of the Supreme Court long ago and accordingly inserted as Article 21A.  It was on the basis of the reasoned finding that without education (basic) a life with dignity was not possible.

    However, the 'Right to Vote' is not yet accepted as a Fundamental Right, by the Supreme Court of India till date.

 This post intends to examine the issue:

Section 62 of ‘The Representation of the People Act, 1951’ defines the Right to vote as below:

“62. Right to vote.—

(1)No person who is not, and except as expressly provided by this Act, every person who is, for the time being entered in the electoral roll of any constituency shall be entitled to vote in that constituency.

(2)No person shall vote at an election in any constituency if he is subject to any of the disqualifications referred to in section 16 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 (43 of 1950).

(3)No person shall vote at a general election in more than one constituency of the same class, and if a person votes in more than one such constituency, his votes in all such constituencies shall be void.

(4)No person shall at any election vote in the same constituency more than once, notwithstanding that his name may have been registered in the electoral roll for the constituency more than once, and if he does so vote, all his votes in that constituency shall be void.

(5)No person shall vote at any election if he is confined in a prison, whether under a sentence of imprisonment or transportation or otherwise, or is in the lawful custody of the police:

Provided that nothing in this sub-section shall apply to a person subjected to preventive detention under any law for the time being in force.

Provided further that by reason of the prohibition to vote under this sub-section, a person whose name has been entered in the electoral roll shall not cease to be an elector.

(6)Nothing contained in sub-sections (3) and (4) shall apply to a person who has been authorised to vote as proxy for an elector under this Act in so far as he votes as a proxy for such elector.”

         Now, what if a person does not have a vote, other than due to any of the exclusions in the above Section?

         The present dispute regarding the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) is a case in point.

       Though the SIR has been conducted in earlier regimes also, the present exercise has been subjected to disputes for a variety of reasons.

The statutory authority for the Election Commission to conduct a revision of the Voter List, flows out of the following provisions of ‘The Representation Of The People Act, 1950’ :

“Section 21. Preparation and revision of electoral rolls.—

(1)The electoral roll for each constituency shall be prepared in the prescribed manner by reference to the qualifying date and shall come into force immediately upon its final publication in accordance with the rules made under this Act.

(2)The said electoral roll—

(a)shall, unless otherwise directed by the Election Commission for reasons to be recorded in writing, be revised in the prescribed manner by reference to the qualifying date—(i)before each general election to the House of the People or to the Legislative Assembly of a State; and(ii)before each bye-election to fill a casual vacancy in a seat allotted to the constituency; and

(b)shall be revised in any year in the prescribed manner by reference to the qualifying date if such revision has been directed by the Election Commission:

Provided that if the electoral roll is not revised as aforesaid, the validity or continued operation of the said electoral roll shall not thereby be affected.

(3)Notwithstanding anything contained in sub-section (2), the Election Commission may at any time, for reasons to be recorded, direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency in such manner as it may think fit:

Provided that subject to the other provisions of this Act, the electoral roll for the constituency, as in force at the time of the issue of any such direction, shall continue to be in force until the completion of the special revision so directed.

 

Section 22. Correction of entries in electoral rolls.—

If the electoral registration officer for a constituency, on application made to him or on his own motion, is satisfied after such inquiry as he thinks fit, that any entry in the electoral roll of the constituency—

(a)is erroneous or defective in any particular,

(b)should be transposed to another place in the roll on the ground that the person concerned has changed his place of ordinary residence within the constituency, or

(c)should be detected on the ground that the person concerned is dead or has ceased to be ordinarily resident in the constituency or is otherwise not entitled to be registered in that roll, the electoral registration officer shall, subject to such general or special direction, if any, as may be given by the Election Commission in this behalf, amend, transpose or delete the entry after proper verification of facts in such manner as may be prescribed:

Provided that before taking any action on any ground under clause (a) or clause (b) or any action under clause (c) on the ground that the person concerned has ceased to be ordinarily resident in the constituency or that he is otherwise not entitled to be registered in the electoral roll of that constituency, the electoral registration officer shall give the person concerned a reasonable opportunity of being heard in respect of the action proposed to be taken in relation to him after proper verification of facts in such manner as may be prescribed.”

 

    The state-wise data regarding additions and deletions through the current SIR is as below (Source: https://www.newsclick.in/exclusive-sir-probe-how-many-voters-did-eci-really-disenfranchise)

 

     The investigation by the Internet Freedom foundation reveals how these ‘logicaldiscrepancies have arisen: 

“The deletions and notices do not occur evenly partly due to how the software reads names which are the data entries. The transliteration engine's failures are systematic rather than random. "Xalxo", the spelling used by the Oraon community, was rendered "Khalkho" and flagged, Md and Mohammed, Sk and Sheikh, and Chattopadhyay and Chatterjee were treated as distinct persons. Each such mismatch between an elector's name, or a parent's name, and the digitised roll surfaces either as an unmapped entry or as a logical discrepancy of the parent-name kind, and therefore as a notice.”

The Wire in its report under the heading ‘In West Bengal, SIR Hearing Notices Surgein Muslim-Majority Districts’ dated 14.01.2026, states as below:

‘..the release of the Draft Roll and Absentee, Shifted, Suspected Dead (ASSD) list sparked resentment in Matua and other Hindu Scheduled Caste localities. These communities were hit heavily by deletions and no-mapping, due to which the narrative backfired. In recent weeks, however, the administrative focus appears to have shifted, through the SIR hearing process, towards minority-heavy Polling Stations (PS).’

‘In The Wire’s earlier constituency-level reading of the SIR draft rolls, “No Mapping” emerged as a key pressure point. Voters who could not be linked to the 2002 roll, the legacy anchor in the SIR 2025 framework, were effectively pushed into a higher-risk verification pathway. But the analysis also produced an inconvenient statistical outcome for BJP’s “infiltration” propaganda. Muslim-majority constituencies appeared among the most consistently mapped and, therefore, among the most documented. In Murshidabad, for instance, Domkal (77.67% minority population) showed just 0.42% No Mapping, while Raninagar (75.40% minority) recorded 0.91%, Hariharpara (74.96% minority) 0.60%, and Lalgola (77.29% minority) 1.1%.

Yet the district-wise hearing numbers reviewed by The Wire tell a sharply different story. Across districts, the share of voters called for hearings climbs steeply with the Muslim population share. Statistical analysis of the dataset shows a strong positive correlation between a district’s Muslim population percentage and the percentage of electors called for hearing per constituency, with a correlation coefficient of 0.79. In practical terms, this implies that approximately 62% of the variation in hearing-call rates across districts can be explained by Muslim population density alone.

The implication is stark: even where Muslims appear highly “mapped” (low No Mapping), Muslim-heavy districts still show the highest hearing intensity, suggesting the system driving voters into hearings is not primarily No Mapping, but other triggers such as “logical discrepancies”, duplicates and name-related mismatches, especially those amplified by script conversion and rigid matching rules.’

In this context, the provisions of the Constitution require to be viewed:

Article 325 of the Constitution of India mandates that “there shall be one general electoral roll for every territorial constituency for elections to Parliament or State Legislatures, and no person can be excluded from or granted a special electoral roll based solely on religion, race, caste, or sex”.

Thus, any exclusion on the basis of religion, race or caste, is strictly Unconstitutional.

Now, let us come to the question of completion of the appellate proceedings under the Principles of Natural Justice.

         The appeals against deletion from the voters list is governed by the Section 24 of ‘The Representation of Peoples Act, 1950’, which reads as below:

“Section 24. Appeals.—

An appeal shall lie within such time and in such manner as may be prescribed.--(a)to the magistrate or additional district magistrate or executive magistrate or district collector or an officer of equivalent rank, from any order of the electoral registration officer under section 22 or section 23(b)to the chief electoral officer, from any order of the district magistrate or the additional district magistrate under clause (a).”

          Now, as long as the above said procedure of appeal has not been completed, the action set out in Section 22 of the said Act is not yet complete and therefore as per the Provisio to Sub Section 3 of Section 21 of the said Act, “the electoral roll for the constituency, as in force at the time of the issue of any such direction, shall continue to be in force until the completion of the special revision so directed”. 

          In respect of WB, as per The Hindu report, 38.31 lakh appeals had been filed before the tribunals as per ECI   This in spite of the ECI stating that only 27 lakhs were deleted due to ‘logical discrepancies’. 

    However as per reports by an investigation by the Internet Freedom foundation, ‘Behind the deletions lay a larger suspect population, the logical-discrepancy software flagged 1.31 crore electors in West Bengal and 2.35 crore in Madhya Pradesh, 17.11% and 41.22% of those electorates, and West Bengal's count fell to about 95 lakh within weeks as the rules were modified mid-exercise.’ 

     As per reports in the Times of India, out of the above appeals, only about 1,26,194 could be decided as in September 2026 (much after the elections have been completed in May 2026) and out of that 93% appeals have been decided in favour of the appellants and have been re-instated in the voter list. 

The remaining appeals are pending.

         Thus when the appeal proceedings are pending, the voter list could not be considered as final and therefore the voter list that existed prior to the SIR ought to have been the basis on which elections should have happened.

         But, unfortunately, in spite of a litigation before the Supreme Court, this did not happen.

    During the Bengal SIR hearings, a Supreme Court judge is reported to have remarked that even if the right to vote was taken away in this election, people wrongfully excluded could come back and vote in the future. 

         It is in this context that the question arises as to whether ‘Right to Vote’ is a Fundamental Right under the Constitution or not.  News reports state that the Supreme Court has held that it is not a Fundamental Right.

        Article 21 of the Constitution of India reads as below:

“21. Protection of life and personal liberty

No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”

     In the landmark judgment Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), Supreme Court held that the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 is not limited to mere animal existence but includes the right to live with dignity. The court emphasized that the procedure established by law must be fair, just, and reasonable, and it cannot be arbitrary, oppressive, or unreasonable.

     In the case of Subramanian Swamy vs Union of India, (WP (CRIMINAL) No. 184 OF 2014) Supreme Court held that ‘Right to reputation is an insegregable part of Article 21 of the Constitution. A person’s reputation is an inseparable element of an individual’s personality and it cannot be allowed to be tarnished and that the right to reputation is an inherent right guaranteed by Article 21’.

     In The Cochin Institute Of Science And ... vs Jisin Jijo The Kerala High Court in its judgement dated 4 June, 2019 held that ‘the fundamental right to life under Article 21 encompasses the right of an individual to make choices and take decisions impacting the evolution of the individual.’  In doing so the High Court placed reliance upon the judgement of the Supreme Court in Puttasamy case where it had been laid down that ‘The freedoms under Article 19 can be fulfilled where the individual is entitled to decide upon his or her preferences. Read in conjunction with Article 21, liberty enables the individual to have a choice of preferences on various facets of life including what and how one will eat, the way one will dress, the faith one will espouse and a myriad other matters on which autonomy and self-determination require a choice to be made within the privacy of the mind.”

     The News Click in its report dated 22.06.2026 states as below:

“In West Bengal and Bihar alone, the state governments –elected on the basis of this faultily implemented SIR–have simply announced –without policy discussion or judicial scrutiny –that the ‘new voters lists’ will be regarded as the final electoral list and linked this to welfare programmes. Both states are now ruled by the extreme right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political behemoth that has –in close collusion with a non-transparent Election Commission of India (ECI) been a “beneficiary” of this SIR process.

Put clearly, if a person’s name is removed from the voter list, their ration card is deactivated, monthly cash transfers are stopped, and even their bank accounts face cancellation. There are also local reports of the possibility of unilateral deletion from agricultural land records, especially if you are a disenfranchised voter from Murshidabad and Malda, Muslim majority districts! This policy effectively treats a deleted voter as someone who has lost their official status as a citizen without the final adjudication of their citizenship status.”

Depriving someone of the right to vote and exclusion from the voters list, could deprive them the very right to exist as a citizen and get any benefits from the Government schemes, which directly impacts their life as well as that of their children, could create a stigma in the eyes of others, as if they are illegal immigrants, as if they have fudged their records earlier, as if their exercising the right to vote earlier was by reasons of fraud or forgery or misstatement and consequently causes irreparable damage to their reputation and also the right to dignity which are enshrined in the Article 21 of the Constitution as has been upheld by the Supreme Court itself.  

Further, as pointed out by the Kerala High Court in the Jisin Jijio case, when the citizens have a right of choice under Article 21 read with Article 19, denial of the right to vote, unless as per the reasons set out in The Representation of Peoples Act, would tantamount to denial of the right to choose ones representative and as a consequence the Government and directly impacts ‘the right of an individual to make choices and take decisions impacting the evolution of the individual’.

If the Supreme Court is not able to see through these, the stature of the Highest Court would be sullied as warned by Justice V.R.Krishna Iyer as below:

"One day the people of this country will rise and say that we don't want this magnificent red stone edifice on the Curson Road because it is seen to be counterproductive and in turn the High Courts."