The Bharatiya Janata Party has, understandably, sought to draw political mileage from the Supreme Court’s recent judgment upholding both the constitutionality of the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in Bihar as well as the Election Commission of India’s powers to conduct such an exercise. The SIR’s importance is unquestionable: a clean and updated electoral roll is central to gauge a democracy’s health. The real concern lay with the exclusionary manner in which the SIR was conducted under the EC’s aegis: an estimated 47 lakh people, many of them from the socio-religious margins, found themselves disenfranchised in that state. Significantly, as part of the same order, the apex court has underlined that the EC has no mandate to decide on the citizenship of electors. That power rests with a “competent authority” — the Union home ministry. The EC, which has struggled to distance itself from the ruling regime in the public eye, must take note of this. A time frame has been allotted to the EC to send the names of deleted voters in Bihar to the said ministry, which will now decide on their citizenship status. But this raises a further — telling — query. If the determination of citizenship falls outside the ambit of the EC, on what basis did it strike off the names of so many people? How is the integrity of the electoral roll upheld by riding roughshod over the rights of the electors? Unfortunately, even the Supreme Court has not made matters clear in this respect. It should have.
This is because the implications of this verdict are wide. In Bengal, around 27 lakh electors were struck off the poll rolls: tribunals appointed by the highest court are scrutinising, at a painstakingly slow rate, their pleas for reinstatement. Similar deletions have taken place in other states where the SIR has been conducted. In Bengal, very little information is available about the status of the pending applications, adding to the anxiety of this constituency. The inclusion of the names of bona fide citizens gone missing from the electoral rolls is a matter of urgent public concern and must be addressed within a specific time period. ‘Constitutionality’ is not only about underlining the powers vested in institutions. It also involves securing the constitutional vision and spirit that envisage inclusion, rather than banishment, of legitimate electors.