SC upholds special intensive revision of voter rolls, says exercise ‘advances f ...
Upholding the legality of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said the exercise “advances the constitutional imperative of free and fair elections”, reported Bar and Bench.The Election Commission has the powers to conduct the exercise under Article 324 of the Constitution, read with the 1950 Representation of the People Act, Live Law quoted a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi as saying.
Article 324 establishes the Election Commission and vests in it the power of superintendence, direction, and control over the preparation of electoral rolls and the conduct of all elections.
Citizenship question
However, the bench noted that the poll panel’s inquiries into an individual’s citizenship status for the purpose of including them in the voter list do not mean that it can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen, Live Law reported.
“Such an inquiry does not amount to a determination of citizenship in the strict sense and any action taken pursuant thereto is confined to electoral consequences alone,” Kant was quoted as saying.
The court directed the Election Commission to forward to the Union government within four weeks the names of the persons who had been deleted from Bihar’s electoral rolls on account of doubtful citizenship, so that the adjudication on their citizenship could be carried out, Live Law reported.
The judgement came in response to a batch of petitions challenging the poll panel’s decision to carry out the voter roll revision exercise, which began in Bihar before being extended to 12 other states and Union Territories. On May 14, the poll panel announced the voter roll revision exercise in 16 more states and three Union Territories.
In Bihar, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30. Concerns had been raised after the announcement in the state that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.
On Wednesday, the court said that free and fair elections “do not rest merely upon the mechanics of polling”.
“They fundamentally depend upon the integrity, accuracy and credibility of the electoral rolls, which form the foundation of the democratic process,” said the bench.
In view of this, it said it was satisfied with the reasons for the revision exercise cited by the Election Commission, which included the passage of more than four decades since the last intensive revision, large-scale additions and deletions to electoral rolls over the years, and migration and urbanisation leading to possible duplication and inaccuracies.
The court also held that it could not accept the contention that the list of documents required by the poll panel was “arbitrary or devoid of rational basis”, particularly after Aadhaar had been included among the accepted documents following an earlier court order.
“Any verification exercise necessarily requires a structured framework,” the chief justice said. “In that context, the prescription of a set of documents is intended to ensure administrative consistency and evidentiary reliability.”
The petitioners’ contentions
The petitions against the exercise had been filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms, political activist Yogendra Yadav, and several Opposition politicians, including Mahua Moitra, Manoj Jha, KC Venugopal and Supriya Sule, Live Law reported.
They argued that the exercise effectively turned the Election Commission into a citizenship adjudicating authority by requiring voters already on the rolls to prove their citizenship through documentary evidence.
They contended that the process was “NRC-like” and created the risk of disenfranchisement.
The National Register of Citizens is a proposed exercise to create a list of Indian citizens and identify undocumented immigrants.
The register was updated in Assam in 2019, after a mammoth scrutiny of ancestral family documents to weed out “illegal immigrants”, and ended up excluding 19 lakh residents of the state. The updated list, however, has not been notified seven years on.
The Election Commission defended the process by arguing that the SIR was not a citizenship determination exercise but an electoral verification process intended to ensure that only eligible citizens remained on voter rolls.
On January 29, the court declined to stay the process while reserving judgment in the matter.
The exercise has since been completed in 13 states and Union Territories, including Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and West Bengal.
Scroll’s analysis of the Assembly election results in West Bengal found that in half the seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party won, the total deletions that took place during the voter list revision exercise outnumbered the victory margin.
While the BJP won 207 seats in West Bengal’s 294-member Assembly, the Trinamool Congress won 80.
Ahead of the elections, the final electoral rolls for the state published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.
By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of the electorate before the process began, had been removed.
Nearly 25 lakh cases challenging their removal from the voter list are pending before appellate tribunals, according to The Indian Express. Till mid-May, 12 out of the 19 tribunals had only disposed of 6,581 of these appeals, or 0.26% of the cases, the newspaper reported.
Edited by Sneha, Neerad Pandharipande and Nachiket Deuskar.
Also read: Three reasons why West Bengal’s SIR exercise was unconstitutional
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