Pleas Against Bihar Voter List Revision heard in Supreme Court

By Sulagna Halder

New Delhi:

On Wednesday The Supreme Court heard a number of petitions against the Election Commission Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar. According to petitioners, revising process, which requires hard documentation to check citizenship, is discriminative and undermines the constitutional guarantees.

Opposition leaders; civil society leaders and activist lawyers, such as Mahua Moitra, Manoj Jha, the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR) and Yogendra Yadav petitioned with this intention. According to them, the revision is a well calculated step that might result in a mass disenfranchisement of the marginalised groups of people, particularly, migrant workers, Dalits and Muslims. Moitra described it as a move to simply erase the votes of the poor and the voice less.

The ADR petition referred to the documents needed by the petition, birth certificates, details of parents and other records as unreasonable and putting unnecessary burden on the common citizens. Petitioners said that the revision, at the height of monsoon season and before elections in later part of the year, was even more part of injustice.

On its part, the Election Commission of India (ECI) explained that anyone engaging in the SIR exercise was because of the article 326 of the Constitution, which grants universal adult suffrage of all Indian citizens. Officials of ECI claimed that the revision was needed to update the rolls in a state where there have been demographic changes such as internal migration and non reported deaths due to which the rolls have not been in synch. The spokesperson of ECI told the media that in a press note that we want to be accurate and inclusive, not exclusive.

The Commission further observed that over 98 per cent of the forms were distributed in Bihar and that over half of them had already come back. Seeing as it is an election and no deserving citizen can be left out because of the absence of documents, officials assured that the local officers will help in processing the verification to the applicants.

Senior advocates like Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi tried to say that such moves, once allowed, would create dangerous precedent, and such a step will deteriorate confidence that people have on democratic institutions. Even though the court declined to grant the immediate stay of the revision process, it accepted to listen to the matter in its full version over the three ensuing days.

This case emerges at a time when there are increased political tension in the state of Bihar whereby the opposition has INDIA bloc accused the ruling coalition of trying to game the electoral process. Mass demonstrations were held in Bihar, Delhi and Kolkata that were followed by nationwide protests on 9 July as a part of the Bharat Bandh. The protests involved train and road blockade, as people demanded rolling back of the SIR order.

The next week, the Supreme Court will provide an interim directive.