Why did the Supreme Court reject the ECI’s Form 6 claim?

The Election Commission of India said the Supreme Court had upheld the declaration attached to Form 6 during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The Supreme Court has now said it did not approve any modification to Form 6.

That is the contradiction at the centre of the latest SIR controversy.

On October 5, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant made the position explicit while hearing petitions challenging the functioning of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and alleged unilateral decisions within the poll panel: “Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us.” The court said it would examine the Election Commission’s records to establish “who has modified what”.

The issue is not merely whether an extra declaration appeared on an online voter-registration form. It is why the ECI treated the Supreme Court’s May 27 judgment on Bihar’s SIR as legal backing for that change when the judgment did not approve a modified Form 6.

That distinction matters because Form 6 is not an ordinary administrative document. It is the statutory application through which a newly eligible voter — including a person who has turned 18, acquired Indian citizenship or whose name was deleted and who seeks fresh enrolment — applies to enter the electoral roll.

The controversy began with the online version of Form 6 available on the ECI’s ECINET portal.

The statutory form, prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, asks applicants for details including the names and EPIC numbers of family members with whom they currently reside. But the online version reported in July contained an additional SIR-linked declaration.

Applicants were asked to indicate whether their own name, or that of a parent or grandparent, appeared in the electoral roll prepared during the previous intensive revision in the early 2000s. Depending on the answer, they could be required to provide the earlier Assembly constituency, polling-station part and serial number associated with their parent or grandparent.

There was an immediate peculiarity: the downloadable Form 6 available on the ECI website did not contain the additional declaration.

So the statutory form and the online form were not identical.

That difference became legally important because no amendment to Form 6 had been notified by the Union government. Under Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, rules governing electoral registration are made by the Central government after consultation with the Election Commission and are laid before Parliament. Form 6 is prescribed through the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960.

In other words, changing the statutory form requires a legal process. No such amendment had been notified between the launch of the Bihar SIR in June 2025 and the controversy over the online form.

The most significant part of the story predates Monday’s hearing.

Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had already objected to the change.

Their objections were part of a broader pattern: an Indian Express investigation found that the two commissioners had recorded objections at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders relating to SIR, voter registration, deletion and restoration of names and electoral-roll databases.

After the online Form 6 changes were reported in July, Sandhu formally recorded on August 13 that the changes were “unauthorised and illegal” and should be removed immediately.

The crucial point is that this was not an objection raised after the Supreme Court controversy.

It was already on the ECI’s internal record.

The two commissioners had questioned the legal route through which the form had been altered, yet the additional declaration remained on the online system.

That leaves a basic institutional question: if the statutory form could not be changed without following the prescribed legal procedure, what authority allowed the online version to carry additional requirements?

The ECI’s September 26 press note changed the legal frame.

It said that “the declaration attached to Form 6 for SIR has been upheld by the Hon’ble Supreme Court”. It also said that, outside the SIR period, the forms prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960 would be used.

The statement appears to have relied on the Supreme Court’s May 27 judgment on the Bihar SIR.

But this is where the distinction between the judgment and the ECI’s interpretation becomes critical.

The May judgment upheld the ECI’s authority to conduct the Bihar SIR. The Court also considered whether the Commission could require additional documentation in the course of such a revision.

That did not amount to a judicial approval of a modified Form 6.

The Court's October 5 clarification therefore does not mean it has already declared the ECI’s action illegal. It means something narrower but crucial: the ECI cannot rely on the Supreme Court’s May judgment as an approval of modifications to the statutory Form 6.

The answer lies in what the Court was actually asked to decide in May and what is being challenged now.

The Bihar case concerned the legality and scope of an SIR exercise. The present controversy concerns the manner in which an additional declaration was incorporated into the online Form 6 system.

Those are related questions, but they are not identical.

The Court’s May judgment recognised the ECI’s powers in conducting an SIR. It did not say: the Election Commission may amend the statutory Form 6.

That is why the CJI’s October 5 clarification was so pointed.

If the ECI had merely implemented an additional declaration under the SIR framework, it must establish the legal and administrative basis for doing so.

If it modified the statutory Form 6, the question becomes whether the prescribed statutory procedure for changing that form was followed.

And if the ECI's September 26 statement suggested that the Supreme Court had already approved the change, the Court now wants to know precisely what decision, document or order the Commission was referring to.

The answer cannot be supplied by a press note. The Court wants the record.

The ECI has maintained that Form 6 itself was not changed and that a separate declaration was merely attached to it under the Bihar SIR order.

But the online process makes that distinction harder to dismiss as purely semantic.

The Form 6 application and the additional declaration were integrated into the same online submission process. According to the ECI’s explanation, the system required only one OTP for both documents rather than separate authentication. This has become part of the argument over whether the declaration functioned as an independent document or, practically, as part of the Form 6 application.

At the same time, the downloadable statutory Form 6 did not carry the additional declaration.

The result was an unusual situation: what appeared to be a new condition for voter registration existed in the digital workflow without appearing in the statutory form itself.

That is precisely why the question of authorisation matters.

The Court has not suspended Gyanesh Kumar.

It has not yet declared the Form 6 modification illegal.

And it has not accepted the Opposition’s claim that the CEC acted illegally and unilaterally as an established fact.

Instead, the bench issued notices to the Centre and the Election Commission and sought the records behind the decisions under challenge. It also refused to pass an interim order restraining Kumar from functioning, with the CJI stressing that the Court could not act solely on newspaper reports before hearing the ECI and the Centre.

But the Court made one institutional point unmistakable.

The Election Commission is a multi-member body. Under the governing law, decisions are expected to be taken by unanimity and, where there is no unanimity, by majority. The Court said that if its examination of the records finds decisions that were neither unanimous nor taken by the required majority, those decisions can be annulled.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi put the consequence more directly: if the records show that decisions were taken without the required institutional process, the Court could declare them ultra vires.

That brings the Form 6 controversy back to the internal objections of Sandhu and Joshi.

Form 6 sits at the entry point to the electoral roll.

Adding an SIR-linked ancestry declaration potentially changes what a first-time voter has to establish before becoming an elector. The applicants were being asked to connect themselves or their parents or grandparents to electoral rolls from an earlier intensive revision — something that can be difficult for young voters whose families were absent from those rolls or whose historical records are unavailable.

That is why the legality of the route matters as much as the substance of the declaration.

Electoral eligibility cannot depend on an administrative requirement appearing somewhere inside software if the legal authority for that requirement is unclear.

The controversy has now produced a particularly uncomfortable sequence for the ECI:

Two commissioners objected to the change.

The change appeared on the online Form 6.

The ECI later said the SIR declaration had Supreme Court backing.

The Supreme Court has now said it did not approve any modified Form 6.

And the Court wants the records to establish who made the change.

The question, therefore, is no longer simply whether Form 6 was modified.

It is why a constitutional election body invoked the Supreme Court to defend a change the Supreme Court says it did not approve — and whether the records will show that the institution followed its own legal and collective decision-making rules before altering the gateway through which citizens enter India's electoral rolls.