Aadhaar at the Gate: Identity, Trust and the Ethics of Inclusion in Bihar's SIR

Today the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar as a 12th prescribed document for the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar’s electoral rolls — while also making clear, emphatically, that Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship (The Wire; New Indian Express). I read the orders and the reporting the way I read any mirror: as a map of who we are prepared to recognise and on what terms.

Identity versus citizenship — a vital distinction

The Court’s distinction matters. Aadhaar is a powerful tool for establishing identity and address; it is not — and should not be treated as — a certificate of citizenship (Times of India; IndiaTV). This was the Court’s sober way of acknowledging two truths at once: the lived reality that many citizens — especially the poor, migrants and those whose paperwork is thin — rely on Aadhaar, and the equally real legal and political need to keep citizenship determinations under the proper statutory processes.

I find that separation reassuring because it recognises a layered ontology of belonging. Identity (I am X, I live at Y) and citizenship (I hold the legal status that grants political rights) overlap in practice but are conceptually different. To conflate them is to invite either wrongful exclusion or administrative overreach.

The social question behind the legal one

This is not only about documents. It is about trust. The SIR exercise in Bihar has been fraught with anxiety — tens of lakhs of names proposed for deletion, fears that poor and marginalised people will be disenfranchised, and questions about transparency in the EC’s processes (The Wire; Tribune). When state institutions lose the public's trust, even technically sound steps look like traps.

That is why the Court’s insistence that the EC must verify the authenticity of Aadhaar submissions is not merely procedural hair-splitting — it is an attempt to restore confidence in the exercise (DNA; Rediff). But verification must be more than a slogan. It requires clear, reliable procedures, training for Booth Level Officers (BLOs), and safeguards against arbitrariness.

The practical tension: coverage, timing and effect

The EC argues that 99.6% of the draft roll already has documentation and that adding Aadhaar now is of limited practical consequence (Times of India; Tribune). The statistics are an important reality check. My reaction is two-fold:

• On one hand, if the vast majority are already documented, the addition may indeed be marginal numerically. That is an administrative truth we cannot pretend away.
• On the other, the moral force of inclusion is not measured only by percentages. If Aadhaar offers a last bridge for even a small slice of the disenfranchised — those who are rural, migrating, or lost in bureaucratic limbo — then its acceptance matters in principle and in consequence.

We must balance the imperative to avoid wrongful inclusions with the duty to prevent wrongful exclusions. A narrowly calibrated, transparent implementation can reduce the risk on both sides.

Technology, power and the risk of bureaucratic drift

Aadhaar sits at the intersection of technology and governance. Digital identity enables speed and scale, but it also concentrates power in processes that are opaque to ordinary people. Verifying Aadhaar authenticity may involve online lookups, OTPs, biometric checks and so on. These are fine tools — yet they can become instruments of exclusion if infrastructure fails or if front-line officials lack training or will.

I worry about two failure modes: (1) technological — signals fail, biometrics don’t match, rural applicants are turned away; (2) human — discretionary refusals, coercive interpretation of ‘genuineness’, or uneven application across constituencies. The Court and the EC must guard against both.

Democracy’s fragile grammar: documents as a grammar of belonging

Documents are a grammar by which the state speaks to its citizens. When grammar is rigid and inaccessible, sentences — citizens’ rights — remain unsaid. When grammar is too loose, meaning dissolves into noise.

The Court’s order, in my view, seeks a middle path: expand the grammar to include a practical, widely held identity token; insist that grammar is not the same as sovereign proclamation of citizenship; and demand verification where meaning could be faked. That is a fragile but honest approach.

Final reflection

I accept the Court’s logic because it treats people as they are: imperfect, mobile, partly documented, aspiring to be counted. But law is not merely about correct words on a page — it is about lived procedures. The real test will be in the low-lit rooms where Booth Level Officers, clerks, and exhausted applicants face each other. If the EC converts the Court’s direction into clear training, transparent checklists, publicly available logs of decisions, and meaningful remedy for mistaken exclusions, Aadhaar’s addition could be a small but real remedy to disenfranchisement.

If instead the order is implemented as a lip-service tweak — words filed and boxes checked — then it will be an occasion where law affirmed inclusion but practice produced exclusion.

I find myself returning to a simple ethical posture: a democracy that values every voice cannot rest on administrative convenience alone. Identity systems must be instruments of enfranchisement, not obstacles dressed as safeguards.

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Regards,
Hemen Parekh