The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Election Commission and the poll panels of Bengal and Kerala to file their counter-affidavits on separate petitions by the two states and some organisations challenging or seeking a deferment of the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The Kerala government wants the SIR to be postponed in view of the upcoming local body polls in the state. The Bengal government has assailed the constitutionality of the SIR on the ground that it would result in the large-scale deletion of voters.
However, during the course of the arguments, the bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi told the petitioners that the apprehension of large-scale disenfranchisement of voters had proved unfounded after the Bihar SIR.
“The initial impression given about Bihar was that lakhs of voters’ names were to be deleted. We were also apprehensive, but you know what happened ultimately,” the bench told senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Bengal and Kerala governments.
“There are deletions, but the deletions hardly had any impact on the ground level or evoked any objections. There is hardly any citizen who has made it to this court (to
challenge the deletion),” the bench remarked.
Sibal argued that under the Representation of the People Act, 1951, the BLOs had no power to determine the citizenship of the voters, prompting Justice Bagchi to say: “BLOs are not deciding whether you are a citizen. He is only verifying whether you were born on X, Y, Z date at X, Y, Z place.”
Sibal submitted that some people who were declared dead by the EC were produced in the court at the earlier hearing.
The bench, however, said the EC had a constitutional duty to weed out dead voters.
The matter is expected to be taken up for further hearing on Thursday.
On November 21, the top court had issued fresh notices on a batch of petitions challenging the ongoing pan-India SIR. The petitions were filed by the Kerala government, Indian Union Muslim League’s Kerala unit, CPM, the Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee and Barabanki Congress MP Tanuj Punia.
The Kerala government and the IUML had both sought deferment of the exercise because of the local body elections in the state on December 9 and 11. Both these pleas will be taken up for hearing on Thursday. The rest of the petitions, which had sought quashing of the SIR notification, will be heard in the second week of December.
On November 11, the earlier bench of Justices Kant and Bagchi had issued notice to the EC on another batch of petitions filed by political parties challenging the panel’s decision to conduct SIR across the country.
The apex court had restrained high courts from dealing with SIR-related petitions as the top court was seized of the matter.
The bench had also sought the EC’s response to the additional affidavit filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) that, among other things, had challenged the poll panel’s jurisdiction to verify the citizenship of voters.