The Supreme Court on Monday issued a written order to the Election Commission to treat the Aadhaar card as the “12th document” for the verification of voters’ identity during the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar.
There have been widespread allegations that despite verbal nudges from the court and assurances from the poll panel that it would accept the Aadhaar as a valid proof of identity, the EC was not taking cognisance of the document, sticking to its own list of
11 documents.
On Monday, a bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi formally passed an order that Aadhaar shall be accepted as the “12th document”, in addition to the other 11 documents. The court was hearing a batch of petitions filed by the Association for Democratic Rights (ADR) and various other organisations.
Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing the EC, recorded an undertaking that the poll panel would henceforth treat Aadhaar as a valid proof of identity.
The bench passed the direction after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), complained that despite the court’s earlier directives, the EC was not accepting Aadhaar during the SIR exercise
in Bihar.
The apex court, however, noted that although the Aadhaar is to be accepted as valid proof of identity under Section 23(4) of the Representation of the People Act, the EC can scrutinise the document to check for authenticity and to weed out forged
and fake cards.
When Dwivedi said the Aadhaar cannot be treated as a proof-of-citizenship document, Sibal countered by saying that the poll panel had no authority to determine the citizenship status of any individual in the country.
Dwivedi argued that for preparing electoral rolls, the EC was within its powers to examine whether a person was a citizen and therefore eligible to vote.
Justice Bagchi pointed out that except for the passport and the birth certificate, none of the other documents on the EC’s list established the citizenship status of a voter.
Later, the bench passed a formal order directing that the Aadhaar card, issued under the Aadhaar Act 2016, shall be accepted for the purpose of establishing identity while hearing the pleas for exclusion or inclusion related to the SIR exercise. The court also made it clear that the Aadhaar shall not be treated as proof
of citizenship.
On July 28, the court had refused to stay the notification of the draft electoral rolls prepared by the ECI for the Bihar Assembly elections later this year, but said it would scrap the SIR process if any anomalies were found.
The court is dealing with a batch of petitions challenging the EC’s June 25 SIR order as illegal, unconstitutional and liable to be struck down. The petitions had feared that the SIR would make over 3 crore voters ineligible.
In its counter affidavit, the EC had on July 21 submitted in the Supreme Court that the poll panel had the plenary powers to conduct the SIR and that it had the authority to determine citizenship. The poll panel had said that a large portion of Bihar’s population already possessed one or more of the 11 documents.
The ADR had pointed out that the SIR exercise started on June 25 and the final electoral roll was published on September 30. The ADR argued that completing such an elaborate process in just 97 days had put many eligible voters at the risk
of disenfranchisement.