Supreme Court’s directive to the Election Commission of India to publish details of 65 lakh names it deleted from the voters list as part of the special intensive revision (SIR) in poll-bound Bihar
The Supreme Court’s directive to the Election Commission of India to publish details of 65 lakh names it deleted from the voters list as part of the special intensive revision (SIR) in poll-bound Bihar, including reasons for non-inclusion, will help salvage the exercise to some extent. That the court dismissed the EC’s argument that rules do not mandate publishing reasons for non-inclusion in draft rolls must now convince the poll panel to take the larger message that the apex court has been trying to communicate to it, that SIR must be an inclusive exercise, not an exclusive one.
The court in its comments and in the order has consistently upheld the right of the EC to conduct the SIR but advised it against disenfranchising people without proper reasons. However, the EC published the draft voters list on August 1, removing 22.34 lakh names saying they were dead, another 36.28 lakh, holding them “permanently shifted/absent" and another 7.01 lakh for having "already enrolled at more than one places”. Together, they make almost eight per cent of a total of 7.93 crore names in the voters’ list before SIR.
The injustice the Election commission was trying to perpetrate became obvious when several people whom it declared dead appeared in the Supreme Court. The paradox is that now they have to go back to the poll officials to prove that they are still around. The EC must at least now recognise the fact that citizens find the right to vote in a democracy a sacred one and that it has no power to deny it. The burden of proof must be on the poll panel to remove a citizen from the list and not the other way round.
The lackadaisical attitude of the EC was evident in the release it issued on Saturday blaming the booth level officer and political parties for the errors on the list. The release inadvertently admits the errors in the list while trying to shift the blame. At least now, it must wake up to the challenge and do right by the citizens of Bihar by doing a proper job of conducting the SIR.
