The State Never Gave Him Papers - Now It Wants Him to Produce Them

When the State Asks Citizens to Prove What It Never Recorded There is a particular kind of unfairness in asking someone to produce a document that was never given to them. That is the situation the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has created for millions of ordinary Indians - asked to prove their date of birth, their residence and their citizenship, using paperwork the Indian state itself failed to build for most of the twentieth century.

THE CASE FOR RIGOROUS VERIFICATION The Election Commission's core mandate under Article 324 is to maintain accurate, clean electoral rolls - free of duplicates, the deceased and ineligible entries. Loose verification standards genuinely do create room for fraudulent enrolment and a "pure" roll is a legitimate constitutional goal, not a bureaucratic indulgence.

Given documented cases of duplicate and stale entries piling up over decades of routine summary revisions, a thorough, document-based re-verification has real justification. THE COST THAT ARGUMENT IGNORES But the documents being demanded were never universally issued.

Birth registration coverage crossed 90% only in the last two decades; before that, most Indians were born at home with no institutional record. A birth certificate "issued at the time of birth" - the strictest evidentiary standard - is held by perhaps one voter in eight.

Aadhaar, the one document that was physically delivered to people's addresses, is explicitly disowned by the state as proof of age, residence or citizenship. The result is not rigour. It is a test almost nobody can pass, applied selectively against citizens who happen to lack political or social capital to contest an official's judgment.

WHERE THIS LEAVES US TAN's position is that the burden of proof in the SIR is misallocated and it should shift decisively toward what the state's own digital infrastructure already establishes rather than what individual citizens can physically produce.

Aadhaar does not need to be a perfect citizenship document to be the right evidentiary anchor here - it only needs to be stronger than the alternative documents most citizens actually hold, which on age (biometric capture timelines), residence (proof of physical delivery) and identity, it demonstrably is.

Genuine outliers and edge cases can be flagged for Home Ministry adjudication, as the Supreme Court has already permitted, without making tens of crores of ordinary citizens the default suspects. A state that spent a decade building Aadhaar cannot credibly now insist that decade produced nothing usable.

The SIR's clean-rolls goal is legitimate; its evidentiary method against citizens the state itself failed to document is not.