EC Ignorant of Own Rules; Trump 'Mediation', Pak 'Flattery' Emerge as Key Drivers of India-US Rift; The Wire Protected from Assam Police 'Midnight Knock'

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

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Snapshot of the day

August 12, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

Including citizens in voter rolls and excluding non-citizens from them is within the Election Commission's remit and the poll body is right in saying that having Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship, the Supreme Court said today with regard to the special intensive revision ongoing in Bihar, adding that the opposition to the exercise appears to be a sign of ‘trust deficit and nothing else’.

When told that many residents are struggling to produce birth certificates or other documents belonging to their parents – which some people not in the 2003 voter list must submit – Justice Surya Kant said that “it is a very sweeping statement that in Bihar nobody has the documents”. He also asked per Debby Jain that surely they must have Aadhaar and ration cards, to which lawyer Kapil Sibal pointed out that the EC is not accepting those documents. The poll body on the other hand said that the SIR is “bound to have some defects here and there at the draft stage” and that these can be fixed. The court will resume hearing the matter tomorrow.

Even as the EC has argued that the SIR is aimed at culling ineligible people from Bihar's voter rolls, a group of people all with the same name living in one house #1 in the Rohtas seat's Kapua village have made it onto the draft list. Their identical names, finds Sumedha Mittal, are “.” She reports: “Seven of their father’s names are also “.”. One is a woman named “.” married to a man called “.”. All are between 26 and 28 years old.”

Another curious presence in the draft rolls is one Minta Devi, who is listed as being 124 years old. If the entry is to be believed, she's got a whopping nine years on the oldest verified woman alive as per the Guinness Book of World