Trump’s Tariffs Leave Modi Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and the Economy on the Ropes; Supreme Court Appears Unmoved By Voter List Anomalies

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 13, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Supreme Court bench hearing arguments on the Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of the voter roll in Bihar does not appear to be moved by the evidence of omissions and chose to describe the process as “in fact, voter-friendly and not voter-exclusionary” given that the poll body is accepting 11 documents as proof of identity as opposed to seven during past revision exercises. “They are expanding the number of documents of identity … it gives you more options,” Justice Joymalya Bagchi said.

To petitioners challenging the EC's power to hold such an intensive revision, the other judge on that bench, Justice Surya Kant, drew attention to Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, which says that the commission “may … direct a special revision of the electoral roll for any constituency or part of a constituency in such manner as it may think fit”. When lawyer Gopal Sankaranarayanan said that the current exercise wasn't taking place just in one constituency but an entire state, Justice Bagchi asked why the SIR could not be seen as a special revision occurring in each of Bihar's seats simultaneously.

Sankaranarayanan also said that adult Indian citizens have the right to be enrolled as voters under Article 326, but Justice Bagchi said the EC would in turn say it has the power under Article 324 to conduct elections and prepare voter rolls. “It is a battle between a constitutional right and a constitutional power,” he said. The bench will likely resume hearing the matter tomorrow.

The lack of digital, machine-readable granular data on electors who didn't make it to Bihar's draft voter roll along with the reasons why is just one part of what makes the SIR's goings-on hard to verify. Other obstacles include a re-numbering of all polling booths – in a situation where hard copies of excluded voters contain outdated booth numbers – reassignments of booth-level officers and the EC's apparent insistence on only using Form 6 – used to enroll new voters – to correct discrepancies in the draft roll, the Congress has said after a field survey it conducted in Bihar's Begusarai district, reports Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta.

The EC is accepting 11 documents as proof of identity in Bihar, but what exactly are the sort of documents that Indians in general can use to prove that they are citizens? Asked this question in parliament, home ministry avoided giving a straight answer, saying only that citizenship is acquired either through birth, descent, registration, naturalisation and incorporation of territory; eligibility is determined by the Citizenship Act of 1955 and its rules.

In Kishanganj, “"people whose names have either been deleted from the voter list or who have been asked to submit additional proof are having to scramble to get the required documents such as residence proof certificates,” Satish Jha reports, adding, “The hardest hit are Muslims.” The issue has stoked a larger fear:

“In districts such as Patna, Begusarai, Purnia, Khagaria and Kishanganj, where DH travelled over the last three days, there is tension among the minority community that SIR is nothing but an attempt to bring in the controversial National Register of Citizens in. Bihar”

Trawling through the new voter list for Valmiknagar in Bihar, Ayushi Kar, Harshitha Manwani and Gayatri Sapru have found that there are more than 5000 persons who also feature in the voting list of Uttar Pradesh:

“We found more than 1,000 voters from Uttar Pradesh to be illegally listed as voters on the new list of Bihar’s Valmikinagar constituency, with exactly the same details recorded in both state lists. Additionally, we have found thousands more who are listed on the new Bihar electoral list and in UP with minor alterations in their details. These add up to more than 5,000 dubious, bogus, or double voters. We detected that all of them hold two different Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers in the two states. This is illegal and leads to fake or wrongful votes being cast.”

Minta Devi, the apparent supercentenarian in Bihar's draft voter roll whose face adorned t-shrts worn by Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi during the Opposition’s ‘Vote Chori’ protest on Monday, has clarified that she is not 124 but 35 years of age. Her brother-in-law had filled an online form for voter ID on her behalf and it is only when the media picked up her case did she realise that her year of birth has been listed as 1900 instead of 1990. No booth-level officer visited her during the SIR, Amit Bhelari quotes her as saying. Meanwhile, the district magistrate of Siwan has attempted to pin the blame for the error on Devi's brother-in-law. Minta Devi is also upset with the Gandhis for using her face without permission.

In a different electoral roll on the other side of the country, the same woman seems to figure at least five times as a voter in the Nalasopara assembly constituency on the outskirts of Mumbai. The case of 39-year-old Sushama Gupta was brought to light on social media, where it was pointed out that she appeared to have six entries to her name, all of them containing different EPIC numbers. A cross-verification conducted by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative using the latest voter roll on the EC's website also yielded six entries to her name, with one of them marked as deleted. On the website, all entries are associated with the same district election officer and electoral registration officer, CHRI director Venkatesh Nayak said to his incredulity.

As analysts continue to make sense of the US-India rift over tariffs, most agree that India is likely to pivot towards China – its geopolitical rival but also an economic and technology powerhouse that could help cushion the impact that reduced market access to the US will have on the Indian economy. “Beijing must be watching with satisfaction,” writes Shi Jiangtao as Trump’s policies are undermining “the fragile coalition countering China in the Indo-