Justice Ujjal Bhuyan of the Supreme Court acknowledged the settled position that the right to vote is not a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution, yet held that any process stripping millions of citizens of their voting rights is unjustifiable and no court can condone it. This observation arose in the context of electoral roll deletions affecting large numbers of voters, highlighting the tension between statutory rights and democratic legitimacy.

The right to vote in India occupies a peculiar constitutional position. It is not a fundamental right under Part III of the Constitution but is a statutory right created by the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and 1951. This distinction was firmly established in Jyoti Basu v. Debi Ghosal (1982), where the Supreme Court held that the right to elect and to be elected is a statutory right, not a common law or fundamental right. Subsequent cases like PUCL v. Union of India (2003) reinforced that the right to vote, while not a fundamental right, is still a constitutional right under Articles 325 and 326, which mandate universal adult suffrage.

Justice Bhuyan's observation introduces an important nuance: even if voting is a statutory right, its mass deprivation can implicate Article 21 (right to life and personal liberty interpreted broadly), Article 14 (equality before law), and the basic structure doctrine — since free and fair elections are themselves part of the basic structure as held in Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain (1975).

The distinction matters enormously for CLAT PG: the examiner frequently tests whether candidates know the precise classification of the right to vote, the specific articles under which it derives constitutional protection, and the threshold at which its curtailment becomes judicially reviewable. Justice Bhuyan's formulation — that mass disenfranchisement is unjustifiable even if voting is not a fundamental right — is exactly the kind of nuanced judicial reasoning that appears as a passage and generates five application-based questions.