In Delhi and Punjab, mapping of voters to their parents’ 2002-03 entries has no basis in law, says KBS Sidhu
Chandigarh, September 21, 2026
While notices to exalted personages in Delhi, including men and women who have held high constitutional and elected offices, dominate the news, over 20 lakh electors in Punjab, close to one in ten, were kept off the state's draft roll published on 13 August as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate. Those left out should file a fresh Form 6, KBS Sidhu said on Monday.
For those who remain on the draft but have been served notices, in Punjab as in Delhi, the citizens are not at fault, he said. The cause is an artificial criterion transposed into the revision process, under which a voter's entry must be mapped to a parent's entry in the electoral roll of 2002-03.
KBS Sidhu, a retired IAS officer of the 1984 batch who superannuated as Special Chief Secretary, Government of Punjab, has discharged statutory duties under the election law at every level of the machinery, from presiding officer at a polling station to District Election Officer, Amritsar, in which capacity he was also the Returning Officer for the Amritsar and Tarn Taran parliamentary constituencies. He has served as an election observer of the Election Commission of India in three successive Lok Sabha elections.
Punjab's window for claims and objections closed on 12 September. Disposal continues until 8 October, and the final roll is due on 12 October. “Form 6 is not a concession tied to a revision calendar,” KBS Sidhu said. “It is the ordinary route to registration, open to any citizen of India who is eighteen and ordinarily resident, right up to the last date for the filing of nominations.”
“The statutory requirement, as it flows from Article 326 of the Constitution and from the Representation of the People Act, 1950, is merely threefold,” he said. “A person must be a citizen of India, must have attained the age of eighteen years, and must be ordinarily resident at the place in question. To this is added a short and closed list of disqualifications, such as unsoundness of mind declared by a competent court, or conviction for corrupt practices. Nothing else was ever required, and nothing else may be added by administrative instruction.”
Article 326 uses the word “entitled”, KBS Sidhu pointed out. The right to be registered is therefore not conferred by any authority, and cannot be withdrawn by a matching exercise run in software. “Universal adult suffrage is a constitutional right, granted by the Constitution itself,” he said. “It is not a bounty conferred by the Election Commission, to be given or withheld as its software directs.” The list of those flagged in Delhi now includes a former Deputy Prime Minister, a serving Union Minister, a sitting Member of the Rajya Sabha whose enumeration form had been checked and countersigned by the Booth Level Officer himself, and a serving Election Commissioner.
With Punjab's Assembly elections due early next year, he appealed to all political parties in the state to turn their energies to expanding the net of eligible voters rather than confining themselves to contesting individual deletions. Every citizen brought on to the roll, he said, is a gain for the democratic process, whichever party he eventually votes for.
KBS Sidhu also appealed to the Election Commission of India to exercise its plenary powers under Article 324 and to confirm that Punjab voters who missed the September deadline may still file Form 6, and are not confined to the appellate procedure alone. That assurance should hold wherever the competent electoral authority has recorded no substantive finding on the person's citizenship.
“Where an authority has applied its mind and recorded a finding that a person is not a citizen, the law provides its own course,” KBS Sidhu said. “Where no such finding exists, and an entry has merely failed a matching exercise, the citizen must not be pushed into an appellate maze for want of a document about his parents.”