These petitions were filed by Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Jha, the Association for Democratic Reforms, PUCL, activist Yogendra Yadav and Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra.
The Supreme Court today agreed to urgently list petitions challenging the Election Commission of India’s decision to conduct a special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in Bihar.
The petition was moved by Senior Advocates Kapil Sibal, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Gopal Sankaranarayanan and Shadan Farasat.
These petitions were filed by Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Jha, the Association for Democratic Reforms, PUCL, activist Yogendra Yadav and Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra.
According LiveLaw, a bench of Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Justice Joymalya Bagchi heard the submission that voters who fail to submit the forms with the specified documents will face the harsh consequence of being deleted from the electoral roll, even if they have voted in elections for the last 20 years. This, they submitted, will lead to four crores out of eight crores thus exposed.
The lawyers added that the ECI’s decision to not accept Aadhaar or voter ID cards made it an ‘impossible’ task to be completed within a very strict timeline.
The bench will hear the petitions on July 10.
A day ago, former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa had written in a column that the timing of the announcement “amid the hysteria of citizenship checks, especially at state and municipal levels in some states, where ‘purification’ was equally important and was used for voter deletion, raises questions about the intent of the EC in the face of the huge population thus affected.”
Lavasa asked why the ECI was attaching value to the cut-off date of 2003, when the last roll revisions took place in Bihar.
“What has strengthened suspicion is the difficulty in fathoming the basis on which ECI is attaching greater evidentiary value to the credentials of only those registered until 2003. Para 11 of the ECI instructions states “the EROs shall treat the ER of 2003…as probative evidence of eligibility, including presumption of citizenship”.”
Crucially, Lavasa adds whether the EC has locus to put people to such a test in a country that has no official citizenship document:
“The furore stems from the fact that the EC was hitherto also relying on documentary evidence and physical verification for inclusion in the ERs while upholding Article 326 but not requiring any proof of citizenship in keeping with the provisions of the Citizenship Act. It is therefore debatable whether in a country where no citizenship document is issued by the government, the ECI should go by a provision that risks depriving citizens of voting rights or follow its own time-tested procedure. The inclusion approach was earlier in keeping with this logic and what the EC has now adopted appears to be a new approach that it has not predicted nor announced earlier.”
Lavasa, who was appointed an EC in 2018, had given several dissenting notes on the issue of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s alleged infringement of the campaigning rules in the 2019 election. He also wrote in the column:
“What would be the fate of electors enrolled earlier, issued EPIC but have now been excluded because of their inability to produce documents? Would the government take over their cases or the judiciary?”