On 27 May 2026 a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — Chief Justice Surya Kant with Justice Joymalya Bagchi — upheld the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls across Bihar and West Bengal and refused to interdict the ongoing roll-revision exercise in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The Court held the SIR validly grounded in Article 324 read with the Representation of the People Act 1950 and the 1960 Rules, drew a doctrinal boundary between the Commission's electoral-roll citizenship inquiry and a Citizenship Act determination, and directed the Commission to forward to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs within four weeks the names of voters deleted on doubtful-citizenship grounds. A close reading of the ruling, its anchor in Mohinder Singh Gill and its place in the 2026-27 electoral cycle.
The May-June 2026 cycle in Indian election law has been an unusually consequential one. The Supreme Court upheld the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in ADR v. ECI on 27 May 2026, reserved verdict in the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act 2023 hearings, declined to interdict the West Bengal SIR rollout before the April Assembly polling, watched the Raghav Chadha + 6 AAP Rajya Sabha MPs cross the floor under Tenth Schedule Paragraph 4 cover, saw the Delhi High Court dismiss a PIL to deregister AAP and disqualify Arvind Kejriwal, declined to interfere with Punjab municipal paper-ballot polling, watched the Election Commission issue an AI-content circular with a 3-hour social-media takedown discipline, and saw the Bombay and Allahabad High Courts shape the pleading and rallying architecture for election petitions and political campaigning. Read together, the cycle resets the operational architecture in which Indian election-law practice now runs.