When the Chief Justice asks, “If an intruder has Aadhaar, should he be allowed to vote?”, the instinctive answer in Indian law is brutally simple, no, because neither Aadhaar creates citizenship nor citizenship flows from welfare identity. The real scandal is not that an “intruder with Aadhaar” cannot vote, the real scandal is that an intruder could get Aadhaar at all, and possibly slip into the voter list through that backdoor.
What the law actually says is that under the Representation of the People Acts and Election Commission rules, the right to vote flows from two conditions, you must be an Indian citizen, and your name must be on the electoral roll of a particular constituency. The Elector’s Photo Identity Card (EPIC) and other documents (passport, ration card, Aadhaar etc.) operate only as supporting identity or address proofs for enrolment or verification; they are not the source of the right, only a way to identify the right-holder.
UIDAI and the Government have repeatedly clarified that Aadhaar is a proof of identity for “residents of India”, not a citizenship card and not even valid proof of domicile or date of birth under law. An official clarification again underlined that Aadhaar “does not confer any right of citizenship or domicile”, echoing Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act which explicitly denies it the status of proof of citizenship.
So when the Court frames a hypothetical that seems to test whether Aadhaar can become a ticket to the ballot box, it is, in effect, testing a proposition already settled in the negative.
Now comes the question: Who is an “Intruder” in this debate? So the bench’s chosen word – “intruder” – is a polite judicial synonym for “illegal immigrant”: Those who enter or remain in India without legal sanction and without any claim to Indian citizenship. Constitutionally, such a person has zero role in electing the government of India, Universal adult franchise under Article 326 is explicitly tied to citizenship and age, not mere physical presence in the territory.
This is where the conflict becomes sharp. On one side, the Court invokes “constitutional morality” to justify giving Aadhaar-based subsidised ration or welfare to even a poor undocumented worker on humanitarian grounds. On the other, it rhetorically asks whether the same identity must automatically translate into political power. The correct constitutional answer is: humanitarian welfare can be extended more broadly on the basis of residence, but democratic sovereignty remains strictly citizen-only. Aadhaar fits only in the first box, never in the second.
Aadhaar As Identity Tool – And As Systemic Leak UIDAI’s own framework recognises any “resident” who has stayed in India for 182 days in the preceding 12 months as eligible for Aadhaar, including “resident foreign nationals”. That is a deliberate design: a welfare and KYC infrastructure for all residents, not a citizenship firewall. That design becomes dangerous only when the state and its agents start treating Aadhaar as a master key for everything: bank accounts, SIMs, subsidies – and quietly, voter registration.
Investigations have shown how illegal immigrants, especially from Bangladesh, used local touts and corrupt enrolment centres to obtain Aadhaar, and then leveraged that Aadhaar to get ration cards and sometimes voter IDs. The Election Commission had to tell the Supreme Court recently that Aadhaar, if collected for electoral roll linkage, is only “for identity”, not proof of citizenship for inclusion or deletion decisions.
So the sharper question for the Court is not “Should intruders with Aadhaar vote?” but “How did an intruder manage to get Aadhaar and possibly EPIC under your watch, and what accountability exists for that?”
The Election Commission is a constitutional body with independent authority to prepare, revise and purify electoral rolls, including through exercises like Special Intensive Revision (SIR). In the Bihar SIR context, the Commission has already made it clear that Aadhaar cannot be the determinant of voting rights, only an optional identity tool; citizenship and factual residence remain foundational tests.
So when a new bench re-poses a question that administratively stands clarified – whether Aadhaar entitles you to vote – it risks muddying precisely the line that the law tried to draw. If the EC is constitutionally empowered to design the process, update forms, use software to detect duplicates, and rely on Booth Level Officers to remove dead or shifted voters, then judicial scrutiny should focus on procedural fairness and wrongful exclusion of genuine citizens, not on re-opening a settled non-question about Aadhaar as a citizenship proxy.[11][5][16]
Let us discuss what must a voter show, and what if his name vanishes? So, legally on polling day, you do not “show Aadhaar to get the right to vote”; you show any accepted ID to prove that you are the same person whose name is already on the electoral roll.If your name is missing from the roll, no document – not Aadhaar, not passport, not PAN – can create the right on the spot; you have to have secured enrolment beforehand via Form 6 or similar processes.
Kapil Sibal’s worry is practical: what happens when a bona fide citizen finds her name deleted due to an over-zealous SIR exercise? That is where transparency, public draft rolls, reasons for deletion, and an easy restoration mechanism become critical, because shifting the entire burden on the voter to discover and rectify the state’s mistake is indeed inconsistent with a rights-respecting electoral culture. But again, the solution is to tighten due process, not to blur citizenship by flirting with Aadhaar as a quasi-citizenship test.
Looking at Europe and the US only reinforces why the “intruder with Aadhaar” framing is hollow. Across the European Union, there is a growing trend of granting some non-citizens, especially EU citizens living in another member state, the right to vote in municipal or European Parliament elections, but national parliamentary elections overwhelmingly remain citizen-only. Some countries even treat any extension of suffrage beyond citizenship for national elections as unconstitutional, firmly ring-fencing sovereign decision-making to nationals.
In the United States, long‑term residents and even Green Card holders who pay taxes and live for decades in the country cannot vote in federal elections; the franchise is strictly tied to US citizenship in law and practice.
The pattern is clear: advanced democracies may open welfare, local participation, or supranational forums to non-citizens, but when it comes to choosing the national government, the line is bright and non-negotiable. If Europe and America do not allow lawful, long‑term foreign residents to elect their central government, why should India even entertain the thought that an illegal immigrant, armed only with a residency-based Aadhaar, could be a candidate voter?
So the questions that actually matter are the sharper questions today are different from the ones posed in open court. Can Aadhaar be treated as proof of citizenship or domicile? No – UIDAI and the Government have categorically denied this in multiple clarifications, and the Aadhaar Act structurally excludes that possibility. Can a non-citizen, even if resident and Aadhaar-holding, claim a right to be on the electoral roll? No – electoral law pegs enrolment strictly to Indian citizenship, age and “ordinary residence” in a constituency, not to possession of any one document.
The real constitutional question, then, is this: when an “intruder” manages to obtain Aadhaar and then creeps into welfare nets or electoral rolls, is the state willing to own up to its failure in border control, identity verification and document discipline? Or will the debate keep circling around a hypothetical that the law has already answered, while the real leakage of sovereignty continues in the shadows?
