On 14 August, after hearing the SIR petitions over three days, the Supreme Court bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi directed the Election Commission of India to upload the full district-wise list of 65.2 lakh names deleted from the draft electoral rolls of Bihar, published on 1 August.

The ECI has also been asked to assign reasons for these deletions in each case. ‘Dead’, ‘untraceable’, ‘permanently migrated’ and ‘duplicate’ were the reasons the ECI had cited for these deletions, but since there wasn’t an accessible full list of deleted names with reasons, there was no way of verifying if and how many of these deletions were in error.

In an earlier hearing on 29 July, the judges had also reportedly said that if illegality, such as wrongful removal from the voter list, was proven, it could lead to the nullification of the SIR exercise.

It took a spirited bunch of petitioners — among them political activist and commentator Yogendra Yadav, NGOs Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), and a bunch of leaders from Opposition parties — to convince the court that the ECI needed to come clean on the SIR exercise.

Yadav appeared in person and made a written submission too. He argued that the SIR exercise was loaded against the poor, the minorities, the marginalised, the illiterate and landless, migrants and women, effectively disenfranchising millions in the state.

The ECI, he pointed out, had not found a single new voter to add in this entire ‘revision’ exercise — against 65-plus lakh deletions — ignoring the moral imperative to ensure that no legitimate voter is left behind. In one fell swoop, the exercise has crashed the state’s elector-to-adult population ratio to 88 per cent from 97 per cent earlier and 99 per cent nationwide.

Edited excerpts from the written submission:

The SIR threatens to permanently and irrevocably alter the architecture of ‘universal adult franchise’ embedded in our Constitution, the laws and rules governing elections. The........

© National Herald