Supreme Court Bench of CJI Surya Kant upholds Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar and other states, limiting its power on citizenship checking.A Bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi has delivered a landmark judgment upholding the constitutional validity of the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. The apex court ruled that the SIR exercise is legally tenable, does not violate the Representation of the People Act, and "breathes life" into the constitutional mandate under Article 324 to ensure free, fair, and pure elections. Addressing a central legal challenge, the Supreme Court clarified that while the ECI has the authority to conduct a "limited inquiry" into citizenship status purely to determine a person's eligibility for inclusion or exclusion from voter lists, it does not possess the unfettered power to determine citizenship in a strict sense. The court emphasized that deletion from a voter list does not divest an individual of Indian citizenship, which can only be adjudicated by competent authorities under the Citizenship Act.The poll panel has been directed to forward the names of individuals deleted due to doubtful citizenship to the Union Home Ministry within four weeks for detailed review. The verdict dismissed a batch of petitions filed by political leaders and NGOs who argued that the stringent ancestral documentation requirements under the SIR risked disenfranchising marginalized and migrant voters.