Owaisi seeks review of Bihar SIR verdict, saying newly surfaced material raises questions about how the Election Commission of India took its decisions. The petition has not yet been taken up.
New Delhi: Contending that material which has come to light since the judgment calls the Election Commission’s decision-making into question, AIMIM chief and Lok Sabha MP Asaduddin Owaisi seeks review of the Bihar SIR verdict, in which the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls [Asaduddin Owaisi v. Election Commission of India].
A Bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant delivered the judgment now sought to be reviewed. Owaisi was not a party to those proceedings; he has come before the Court as an elector, an elected representative and the leader of his party. The case number, the listing date and the review Bench have not been made available, and the Election Commission’s response to the petition is awaited.
What Owaisi asks for
The prayer is for the Court to look at the newly disclosed material and to call for the relevant official records from the Election Commission.
The new material, as the petition describes it
According to the petition, the Commission filed extensive affidavits and documents yet did not disclose the internal objections of its members. It relies on a newspaper report which, in the plea’s account, indicates that about 14 decisions were taken over roughly 10 months without the concurrence of Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. A second source is a report by the Reporters’ Collective, dated October 9, alleging that Commission software auto-generated 85,854 deletion forms during the Uttar Pradesh revision. These are assertions made in the petition and have not been tested by the Court.
The legal footing, per the petition, is paragraph 75 of the judgment. That paragraph protected the Commission’s power under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act only so long as it acted within the statute, and the judgment itself accepts that judicial interference is warranted where the decision-making process is vitiated by arbitrariness. The internal file notings, correspondence and decision records now surfaced were, it says, in the Commission’s exclusive custody and outside the public domain, so they could not have been produced earlier.
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A narrow door
Review jurisdiction is limited. It ordinarily opens on discovery of new and important matter that could not be produced earlier despite due diligence, on an error apparent on the face of the record, or for any other sufficient reason. This petition is built on the first ground, so its fate will turn on whether the Court accepts that the material was beyond the petitioner’s reach earlier. Nothing has been decided, and the Commission remains free to answer the allegations once the Court takes up the petition.
Case Title: Asaduddin Owaisi v. Election Commission of India (review petition)
Court: Supreme Court of India
Date of Filing Report: October 14, 2026