​Roll recall: on Supreme Court and the Bihar SIR exercise

In what must be seen as a rap on the knuckles of the Election Commission of India (ECI), the Supreme Court of India ordered it to publish the names of 65 lakh voters excluded from Bihar’s draft electoral roll, and the reasons, following the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. That it required the Court to compel the ECI to follow the basic principles of natural justice for these voters underscores the pressing lacunae in the institution’s conduct of the SIR and the presumptuous and hasty manner of its implementation. There has been no consolidated list of the excluded electors whose names, the ECI claims, have been removed because they have died, or are untraceable or have fake/duplicate entries. No reasons have been provided against each name. Data analysed by The Hindu and ground reports have highlighted significant anomalies. A much higher number of women (close to 32 lakh) than men (close to 25 lakh) have been excluded despite more men having migrated, and recent death rates having been slightly higher among men too. Reports indicate that several voters have been wrongly identified as dead or had not been enumerated despite having valid voter IDs and proof of residence across areas. The Court’s intervention now provides a meaningful way — the ECI deadline of September 1 to complete the filing of claims and objections is near — for such voters to address their anomalous situations.

The Court will continue to hear the case on the SIR which has other problematic elements to it. The constitutionality of the exercise itself, conducted after the ECI’s own summary revision in January, remains to be adjudicated. Also, the ECI still insists that enumerated voters in the draft roll are vetted by Election Registration Officers based on the availability of one of 11 indicative documents, which do not include the more universally available Aadhaar or ration cards. With the Court ordering the ECI to allow excluded citizens to file objections with their Aadhaar card and having nudged it to accept this document in two previous hearings, the ECI must now include the Aadhaar card as an identity document also. The Court’s order also shines a light on the ECI’s use of non-transparent means to conduct the SIR; it has made it onerous for civil society to parse the electoral rolls and it continues to use that ploy even now by refusing to put up the full list of those excluded and the reasons in one place. Universal adult franchise has been a cornerstone of India’s democracy since Independence. The upcoming hearings in the case and the ECI’s actions in rectifying its role in Bihar’s SIR process will go a long way in assuaging serious concerns about the voter enrolment process in the country today.