Citizens or Voters? What the Supreme Court's SIR Verdict Reveals About India's Fractured Idea of Citizenship

The public debate on citizenship in India today remains beset by two strange inconsistencies. It is overwhelmingly technical, confined to the boundaries of law, rules and administrative orders. Certainly, the Constitution and its subsequent statutes provide the legal bedrock of citizenship. It is also true that these legal technicalities have been invoked by political players to transform citizenship into a crucial electoral issue, especially in the border States. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA)-National Register of Citizens (NRC) debate is a good example in this regard. It does not, however, mean that Indian citizenship can be reduced to laws and rules passed by governments over the years. It is also a moral claim that defines the emotional attachment of an individual to his/her nation. Yet, the public debate on citizenship in India remains largely insensitive to these deeper ethical questions.

The second inconsistency lies in the highly polemical nature of the debate itself. The attitudes of both the political elite and public commentators have been strangely reductionist. Changes introduced by the successive governments over the past two decades have either been celebrated as policy mechanisms to correct the mistakes of the past or completely rejected as politically motivated moves. It is, of course, not surprising in the present context. Our public life has become so divided and polarised that it is natural for political players to protect and nurture their established positions and views. This structural rigidity fails to capture the diverse and profoundly assertive expressions of citizenship that have emerged in recent years.

Let us examine the official, technical meaning of citizenship. The May 2026 Supreme Court judgment in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) case is perhaps the most relevant and comprehensive source for understanding the technical aspects of the present debate. (The statement made by an official of the Ministry of External Affairs about the legal value of the Indian passport as evidence of citizenship should be separated from the Supreme Court verdict for obvious analytical purposes. The court judgment is based on legal reasoning and interpretation; and for that reason, it has its own value.).

The Supreme Court judgment makes three important observations. First, it offers an overarching definition of citizenship. It argues that citizenship “is not a matter of mere formal classification. It is the juridical basis of an individual’s relationship with the State...[which] situates a person within the political community and enables participation in the democratic process.” It makes clear that the significance of citizenship is not confined to electoral participation alone and the idea of a national political community is broader and more comprehensive.

Second, the court employs this broad conceptualisation to make an interesting distinction between “an adjudication of citizenship …and an administrative satisfaction as to eligibility for enrolment”. It argues that adjudication is a conclusive determination of a person’s status under the CAA, while administrative moves such as SIR are a limited enquiry undertaken for the purposes of electoral representation. In other words, exclusion from the voter list does not mean that a person is not a citizen of India. The judgment notes:

Where the material furnished by an individual does not inspire confidence or give rise to doubt, the Commission is within its authority to decline enrolment or to initiate action for deletion, strictly in accordance with law…It does not amount to a declaration that the individual is not a citizen of India; it merely reflects the Commission’s inability to be satisfied, for electoral purposes, that the statutory conditions are met.

The third observation is future-oriented. While accepting the fact that the Election Commission of India (ECI) is not the competent authority to determine citizenship of an individual, the court proposes a mechanism to resolve this contentious issue. It says:

…In cases where the Commission is not satisfied that a person meets the statutory conditions for inclusion in the electoral roll, it would be incumbent upon it to refer such an individual to the competent authority within the Central Government for adjudication in accordance with law.

The Supreme Court verdict thus introduces us to two categories of citizens: 1) the citizen-voters, who have satisfied the ECI that they have valid documentary evidence to show that they are the legitimate citizens of India and can hence participate in the electoral process as voters; and 2) the citizen non-voters whose names have been deleted from the electoral rolls owing to certain technicalities, but whose citizenship status is unaffected. It appears that the Supreme Court is fully aware of this fragile and technically paradoxical classification, which is why the judgment strongly asserts that the status of non-voter citizens ought to be defined by the authorities at the earliest to establish a neatly worked out legal framework of citizenship.

We need to go beyond these legally sophisticated categories of citizen-voters and citizen non-voters to make sense of the notion of political community in the Indian context. Our freedom movement, especially the Gandhian Satyagraha, introduced us to a powerful term: jan (the people). It was used to highlight a different kind of collective political existence, one that could accommodate subaltern groups dismissed as uncivilised, uneducated, and even unfit for any kind of citizenship. Of course, there was a tiny civil society consisting of the rich, educated, and powerful individuals. However, the Gandhian movement expanded the scope of nationalism by transforming it into a people’s movement. The people, in this schema, became a powerful means to stake claim to swaraj (self-rule).

This historical legacy found a new political register in our Constitution. The Preamble opens with the phrase “We, the people of India”. Here, the people should not merely be understood as citizens. Instead, there is a strong ethical claim, an assertion that “we, the people” are the real sovereign of the Republic. The Preamble emphasises that the people are the primary agents for achieving the imagined constitutional society rooted in egalitarian values—justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

The category of “people” in public life gradually evolved in two different directions. In the initial decades after independence, competitive electoral politics addressed voters in the name of the people, which is why janata (the public)—and not nagrik (citizens)—emerged as the preferred term to describe the transactional relationship between voters and the political elites. There was another sphere of politics, situated outside the realm of electoral democracy, where “the people” as a category endured in a profound way. Women’s struggles for gender justice, Dalit and Adivasi movements, peasant and workers movements, and the struggles of displaced communities all described themselves as “people’s movements”. This rights-based political discourse was further strengthened by the post-Emergency civil liberties movements which invoked the egalitarian spirit of the Constitution to define the people as a political community, one that combines sangharsh (struggle) and nirman (constructive work). This conceptualisation of the people transforms common individuals into active agents committed to peaceful social change.

This brings us to a basic question: how do these three categories—citizen-voters, citizen-non-voters and the people—relate to the state? Citizen-voters are recognised members of a legally defined political society. They have legal recognition as voters as well. This recognition provides a legitimacy to their transactional relationship with the political class. Citizen non-voters hold citizenship rights except the privilege of electoral participation. Their entitlements are, however, transitory until they re-establish themselves as citizen-voters. “The people” is a historically evolved political category in the Indian context, whose legal-constitutional definition is inextricably linked to the idea of the citizenship. It draws its legitimacy from the Constitution and relates to the state not as subject but as its real sovereign.

Hilal Ahmed is a political analyst. He works on Indian democracy and Muslim political discourse.

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