Supreme Court notice to ECI on plea against Maharashtra SIR deletions
Supreme Court notice to ECI on plea against Maharashtra SIR deletions
M.U.H
25/10/202611
The Supreme Court on Monday sought the response of the Election Commission of India on a petition challenging the special intensive revision (SIR) exercise in the state and an interim direction to keep the process in abeyance till the issue is decided by the court.
A bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant posted the matter for hearing on November 5 after it was informed that the final state electoral roll pursuant to receipt of claims and objections will be published on November 6.
The petition, filed by Arun Anandagiri, a chartered accountant and journalist, said the situation is so serious that over 40% of the voters in Mumbai and Pune stand deleted.
The deletions followed the SIR process with Mumbai recording the highest number of excluded names (around 3.6 million), followed by Pune (2.86 million), Thane (2.85 million) and Nagpur (1.4 million).
Senior advocate Arvind Datar appearing for the petitioner said, “The problem faced by Maharashtra is unique. There are 3500 redevelopment projects going on in Mumbai and about 1500 projects in Pune. These persons (displaced by the projects) are to be allotted fresh flats and have been provided alternate accommodations elsewhere. During SIR, they were shown as “not found” in their earlier addresses which has led to their deletion from the rolls. About three crore (30 million) persons have been knocked off the rolls in this manner.”
While Datar sought an urgent order to ensure the final roll is not finalised by November 6, the bench, also comprising justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana said, “Don’t worry. You are a whistleblower. You are before us. We will see if any order is to be passed if the need arises. We will issue orders after hearing the other side.” The court has also sought responses from the Centre, Maharashtra government and the chief electoral officer of Maharashtra on the petition.
The matter was mentioned on October 15 for urgent hearing and a request to take up the matter along with the Delhi SIR case. However, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant said that the issue needs to be dealt with state-wise and that it would hear the matter on October 26. The petitioner stated that he himself has not been excluded from the voter rolls but was alarmed and concerned by such a vast exclusionary exercise.
The petition cited news reports to allege flaws in the decision-making process on SIR within the Election Commission of India (ECI) and challenged it on the grounds that decisions taken in this regard were neither unanimous nor taken by majority by the three-member poll panel. To be sure, this is at odds with what has been stated by ECI.
The court is already hearing a challenge to the SIR process and the functioning of ECI in a batch of petitions filed by Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and other Opposition leaders. The court is expected to take up these petitions on Tuesday along with pending petitions filed by social activist Rakesh Kumar Singh and advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi .
The present petition informed the court that the process for receiving claims and objections from deleted voters in Maharashtra is ongoing as the final electoral roll is slated for publication next month. The petition said that the data is shocking as out of the 97.9 million total voters in the state, about 20 million voters have been deleted and about 12.2 million individuals have been separately flagged for “logical discrepancies”.
Datar pointed out that the deleted voters were asked to enrol as new voters by filling Form 6, arguing that this could not be done because these voters would expose themselves to penal consequences by wrongly declaring that they had not voted in any past election.
The petition is limited to the SIR challenge in Maharashtra and said that, until the court finally adjudicates the issue, the SIR process for the State of Maharashtra should be kept in abeyance, and no voter whose name appeared in the pre-SIR list should be excluded or deleted.
The latest SIR, an electoral roll cleansing drive, started with Bihar in June last year, to remove bogus, duplicate, and ineligible voters, including deceased individuals and “illegal immigrants”. The SIR sparked criticism from the Opposition, which alleged that the exercise is a strategic voter roll clean-up drive by the poll body to benefit the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The SIR in West Bengal was one of the most contentious in recent years, with the deletion of nearly nine million from the electoral roll. The difference in absolute votes the BJP and the Trinamool Congress (TMC) polled was similar to the total SIR deletions. The TMC has maintained that the deletions helped the BJP win West Bengal elections. The BJP, which swept to power in the state for the first time, winning 207 of 294 seats, has rejected this link.
