The Supreme Court may have upheld the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, but it did so while drawing an equally important constitutional boundary. The Commission may determine whether a person is entitled to vote; it cannot determine whether that person is an Indian citizen. That distinction is now under strain. The controversy surrounding former Telegraph editor R. Rajagopal’s passport renewal has shifted the debate from electoral administration to constitutional governance.

If his account is correct, the obstacle he encountered was not a judicial finding that he was ineligible for citizenship, but the administrative consequence of his name having been deleted from the electoral roll. Whether intentional or not, this risked converting an electoral exercise into a gateway for restricting unrelated civil rights. The Supreme Court anticipated precisely such a possibility. While recognising the Election Commission’s constitutional authority under Article 324 to undertake an intensive revision of electoral rolls, it also made clear that any inquiry into citizenship is confined to deciding electoral........

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