Hyderabad, Sept. 18 -- In constitutional democracies, universal adult suffrage is neither a statutory concession nor an administrative privilege; it is the foundational bedrock of popular sovereignty. When electoral roll sanitisation transitions from an inclusive audit into a mechanism of arbitrary exclusion, the democratic contract collapses.

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) undertaken by the Election Commission of India (ECI) presents precisely this crisis. Framed officially as an exercise to purge duplicate and ineligible electors, its real-world implementation, marked by opaque procedures, unchecked field discretion, and large-scale disenfranchisement, has drawn sharp criticism from senior jurists and former members of the higher...