SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday, May 27, gave its stamp of approval to the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls – a large-scale exercise to weed out ineligible, duplicate or ghost voters from voter lists – ruling that it was not only lawful but essential to ensuring free and fair elections.
A bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi delivered the ruling on a series of petitions that had challenged the ECI’s decision last June to carry out the exercise, beginning with Bihar.
What the court said
The bench held that clean and accurate voter lists were as important to democracy as the act of voting itself, and that the Election Commission was well within its powers to undertake such a verification drive.
“When the law itself allows a special revision at any time, for reasons to be recorded and in the manner the Election Commission deems fit, the exercise cannot be struck down merely because it does not follow the usual steps for a routine revision,” CJI Surya Kant said while reading out the judgment.
In simple terms, the court said that just because the SIR was conducted differently from a regular, periodic voter list update did not make it illegal.
The bench accepted the reasons the ECI had cited for launching the exercise: the last such intensive revision was held over 40 years ago, there had been large-scale additions and deletions to voter rolls over the years and rapid migration to cities had likely resulted in the same voter being registered in multiple places or people who had moved away remaining on old lists.
Procedure found to be lawful
The top court rejected the argument that the ECI had gone beyond what the law permitted in the way it conducted the exercise.
It also dismissed the contention that asking voters to re-verify their details was the same as questioning their citizenship, a concern that had been at the heart of the legal challenge.
The core question before the court was whether the ECI had the legal authority to carry out the SIR in the form it did. The court ruled it did.
The SIR had already been completed in Bihar, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Puducherry and West Bengal during the pendency of the case, as the court had declined to put it on hold. The exercise is currently underway in several other states, including Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan. The court had heard all arguments and reserved its judgment on January 29.
The challenge
Most petitions were filed in June last year after the ECI announced the SIR in Bihar. Among those who approached the court were the Association of Democratic Reforms, activist Yogendra Yadav and MPs, including Mahua Moitra (Trinamool Congress), Manoj Jha (Rashtriya Janata Dal), KC Venugopal (Congress) and Supriya Sule (Nationalist Congress Party-Sharad Pawar).
The petitioners had argued that the exercise was not simply about updating voter lists but was effectively forcing citizens, many of them already on the rolls for years, to prove they were Indian all over again. That power, they said, belonged only to courts and authorities dealing with citizenship law, not the Election Commission.
They had compared the exercise to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process, saying it created the same chilling effect where ordinary voters being made to feel that their place on the voter list, and by extension their citizenship, was under suspicion.
A particular concern raised was what the petitioners called “suspended citizenship” – if someone’s name was removed from the voter list while verification was pending, that person would be effectively barred from voting without any formal finding that they were not a citizen. That, they argued, was fundamentally unfair.
They also challenged the legal basis of the exercise, arguing that the relevant law allowed a “special revision” only for specific constituencies in exceptional circumstances and not a sweeping, simultaneous drive across multiple states at once.
The petitioners had also invoked an earlier Supreme Court ruling in the Lal Babu Hussein case, which had held that once a person is on the voter list, there is a presumption in their favour – meaning anyone who wants them removed must prove their ineligibility, not the other way around. The SIR flipped this principle on its head by making voters prove they belonged on the list, they argued.
ECI’s defence
The Election Commission defended the exercise as a routine but necessary housekeeping measure and not a citizenship probe. It argued that the Constitution required voter lists to include only eligible citizens and that ensuring this was its basic duty.
The ECI rejected the NRC parallel outright, saying the SIR was a gentle, administrative process carried out by election officials and not a coercive investigation by police. It said adequate safeguards were built into the process.
On the Lal Babu Hussein ruling cited by petitioners, the ECI argued the comparison did not hold because the circumstances were different – that earlier case had involved police-led verification with no procedural protections, unlike the present exercise.
The ECI also maintained that being previously listed on the voter roll still carried weight and was not being ignored, and that the exercise was driven entirely by institutional necessity and had nothing to do with the political controversy surrounding it.
SOURCE : SIASAT
