SC Tells ECI to Publish Details of 65 Lakh Voters Deleted from Rolls, Reasons for Their Exclusion

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the Election Commission of India (ECI) to publish details of the 65 lakh names deleted from the voters’ list in Bihar, along with the reasons for their non-inclusion, to enhance transparency in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral roll in the poll-bound state.

A two-judge bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi passed the order while hearing pleas challenging the ECI’s June 24 decision to conduct the SIR in Bihar.

The names of 65 lakh voters, which were part of the previous electoral roll, were omitted from the draft roll published on August 1. The court directed that the list, containing the names of those who have died, migrated, or moved to other constituencies, be displayed along with the reasons at panchayat-level offices and the offices of district returning officers.

The bench also stressed the need for wide publicity through newspapers, including both vernacular and English dailies, as well as television news channels and radio, informing the public about where the lists would be available.

People aggrieved by the deletion of their names have been allowed to approach election officials with their Aadhaar cards. The court further directed the ECI to file a compliance report by August 22.

On August 1, the ECI had cited the reasons for the deletions as death (22.34 lakh), “permanently shifted/absent” (36.28 lakh), and “already enrolled at more than one place” (7.01 lakh).

Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the ECI, said the poll panel had ample powers to take such decisions but lamented that it operated in an “atmosphere of sharp political hostility” where most of its decisions were contested. He said the ECI was “caught between the struggle of political parties” that label EVMs “bad” when they lose and “good” when they win.

Dwivedi added that, by conservative estimates, around 6.5 crore people in Bihar were not required to submit any documents for the SIR since they or their parents were registered in the 2003 electoral roll. The court asked the ECI to clarify which documents were considered during the 2003 intensive revision.

Advocate Nizam Pasha, appearing for one of the petitioners, argued that there was no evidence justifying the use of January 1, 2003, as the reference date for the exercise. He contended that the claim that voter ID cards issued during the 2003 intensive revision were more reliable than those issued during annual summary revisions was “incorrect.”

Pasha argued that if the process for intensive and summary revisions was the same, EPIC cards issued under summary exercises should not be discarded. He said the 2003 date was invalid and not based on “intelligible differentia.”

He further pointed out procedural lapses, saying no receipts were given for enumeration forms and booth-level officers had excessive discretion in accepting or rejecting applications.

Senior advocate Shoeb Alam, representing another petitioner, criticised the ECI notification for lacking sufficient reasoning, claiming the process was neither “summary” nor “intensive” but a creation of the notification itself. “This is a process of voter registration and cannot be turned into a process of disqualification,” Alam argued.

The Supreme Court, in its observations on Wednesday, had stated that electoral rolls cannot remain static and must undergo revisions. It also said that expanding the list of acceptable identity documents from seven to eleven for Bihar’s SIR was “voter-friendly and not exclusionary.”

Leaders of Opposition parties, including the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), the Congress, and the NGO Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), have challenged the ECI’s electoral roll revision drive in Bihar.