New Delhi : The Supreme Court said there was logic and practicality involved in the Election Commission’s move to conduct Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar but questioned the timing of the exercise, coming months ahead of Assembly elections. A bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi said there was nothing wrong with purging the electoral rolls through an intensive exercise in order to see that non-citizens don’t remain on the rolls.
Your (ECI) exercise is not the problem, it is the timing, the court said. Last month, the EC ordered a revision of the electoral rolls of Bihar, saying large-scale additions and deletions over the last 20 years had increased the possibility of duplicate entries. Advocate Sankarnarayanan, appearing for the petitioners, called the exercise completely arbitrary and discriminatory. He clarified that he was only challenging the manner in which it was being conducted, and not the power of the EC.
They are saying that before 2003 the presumption of citizenship is in your favour. However, after 2003, even if you have voted in five elections, it doesn’t matter whether the presumption of citizenship is not in your favour, he said. A major bone of contention has been Aadhaar and voter identity cards not being included in the list of 11 indicative documents that the applicants can produce during the exercise.
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, also representing the petitioners, also chimed in. “Who are they (ECI) to say we are citizens or not. The burden is on them and not me. They have to have some material in their possession to say that I am not a citizen, Sibal said. The top court questioned the Election Commission on its decision to exclude Aadhaar from the list of accepted documents.
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