Regular readers of this series — Don’t Wait for the BLO to Knock Twice, SIR Process Creates a Stir, and most recently Who’s Afraid of the SIR?, in which I urged every voter left off the BLO’s list to walk into a Voter Service Centre and file Form 6 themselves — will recall that I have consistently treated Form 6 as the citizen’s reliable safety net. That net has just acquired a hole, and it deserves scrutiny, coming as it does close on the heels of SIR — Senseless Impairment of Rolls, the previous piece in this series.
An instruction parading as a statutory form
The Election Commission has quietly added a new declaration to the online Form 6 on its ECINET portal: every fresh applicant must now state whether they, or a parent or grandparent, were enrolled in the last SIR roll — and, if so, furnish the constituency, booth, and serial number. The portal will not let an applicant proceed without answering. An EC functionary has candidly admitted the declaration was “added through instructions” and that “Form 6 has not been amended.” That admission is the whole problem.
Form 6 is not the Commission’s to amend by circular. It is a form prescribed under the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, framed by the Central Government under Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. Altering a prescribed form is, in law, an amendment to subordinate legislation — it requires a Law Ministry notification in the Gazette, not an internal instruction to a portal vendor. On the evidence so far, no such notification exists. What the ECI has built instead is a functional amendment dressed as a UI change: not mandatory in name, but a hard gate in practice, since the online form simply will not submit without it.
No doubt the Election Commission enjoys plenary power under Article 324 — superintendence, direction, and control of elections. That power is real, and I have never contested it in this series. But where Parliament and the Rules made under the Act have specifically prescribed who frames statutory forms and how they may be amended, the Commission cannot arrogate that power to itself under the pretext of an expansive reading of Article 324. The plenary power fills gaps the statute leaves open; it does not override a field the statute has already occupied. Form 6 is precisely such an occupied field — Section 28 vests the amending power in the Central Government, not the Commission, and Article 324 was never meant to be a shortcut around a procedure Parliament deliberately assigned elsewhere.
Why the mechanism matters, not just the requirement
This is not a small point of procedure. A citizen’s right to be placed on the electoral roll cannot be conditioned on compliance with a requirement that has never been laid before Parliament or published for public notice, however administratively convenient the Commission finds it. If the ECI believes new applicants should demonstrate legacy linkage to an earlier roll, it is free to make that case — through the Law Ministry, in the Gazette, in the ordinary way every other addition to this Rules-based architecture has been made. What it may not do is achieve the same result by portal engineering, bypassing the very safeguards that rule-making exists to provide: public notice, the chance to object, and — where Section 30 applies — parliamentary oversight.
The unanswered question for applications already filed
There is also an unanswered question hanging over every applicant who filed Form 6 — online or offline — before this declaration appeared. Since the statutory form remains, on paper, unamended, those applications were complete when filed. Nothing in administrative law permits treating a compliant application as retroactively deficient because of a requirement invented afterward. If any ERO or BLO is now sitting on pre-change applications awaiting this declaration, that is itself worth challenging. Such an applicant would do well to note, and keep, the acknowledgement number and filing date generated at the time of submission — that timestamp is now the operative fact. If an ERO subsequently raises the missing declaration as a ground for withholding or rejecting the application, the correct response is not to scramble to supply it, but to point out, in writing, that no notified amendment to Form 6 existed on the date of filing, and that the application must be processed on the form as it then stood. Should the ERO nonetheless refuse to act, or sit on the application indefinitely, that refusal becomes a specific and documented grievance — appealable to the District Election Officer or Chief Electoral Officer under Section 24 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and, if that fails, open to challenge under Article 226. The paper trail an applicant creates now, simply by asking for a written reason, is what will make that appeal possible later.
The Commission owes the country one of two things: a properly notified amendment to Form 6, or the immediate withdrawal of the mandatory gate on ECINET until one exists. An instruction is not a Rule, and a portal is not a Gazette.