The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued a notice to the Election Commission on a batch of petitions filed by political parties challenging the poll panel’s decision to conduct a pan-India SIR on the lines of Bihar.

The apex court restrained all high courts from dealing with the SIR issue since it is seized of the matter. It asked the high courts to keep in abeyance all pending petitions until it decides the issue.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi also sought a response from the poll panel on the additional affidavit filed by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), which, among other things, has sought a direction that the poll panel has no jurisdiction to deal with the citizenship claims of individuals.

When Justice Kant, heading the bench, asked why the petitioners were apprehensive of the SIR, the senior advocate representing the DMK said they were more concerned about the poll panel’s decision to complete the exercise within a month, which could lead to large-scale deletion of voters.

The Bengal Congress Committee, the CPM’s Tamil Nadu unit state secretary, P. Shanmugam, and Trinamool Congress MP Dola Sen on Monday filed separate petitions in the Supreme Court challenging the poll panel’s decision to replicate the Bihar special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across the country. Tamil Nadu Opposition AIADMK has filed a petition in support of an all-India exercise.

In his petition, Shanmugam, however, clarified that he is not opposed to the SIR but to the short timeline fixed by the poll panel.

The AIADMK is the only party to file an intervention petition supporting the SIR on the ground that a large number of fake and duplicate voters are enrolled in the state. However, the apex court on Tuesday asked the AIADMK to sumbit a separate writ petition instead of an intervention application.

Besides questioning the Election Commission’s power to determine the citizenship status of individuals, advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing ADR, said the poll panel should consider using “de-duplication software” that helps address the issue of bogus voters.

He wanted the court to direct the poll panel to issue acknowledgement slips to voters who had filled the enumeration forms, as, according to him, the commission was not issuing them. Bhushan wanted the poll panel to furnish the voter’s list to the electorate in a “machine-readable format” so that voters could verify their names on the list. The bench then asked the poll panel to file its response on all the issues raised by ADR.