How SIR can mar SC’s honour

As the custodian of the Constitution, mass disenfranchisement cannot but compromise the Supreme Court’s dignity. Representation pic/iStock

When Shankar Dayal Sharma made a Presidential Reference to the Supreme Court, in January 1993, seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu structure existed at the site of the Babri Masjid before it was built, a five-member bench declined to furnish it. In their opinion, different from the arguments of the other three judges, Justice AM Ahmadi and Justice SP Bharucha said, "Ayodhya is a storm that will pass. The dignity and honour of the Supreme Court cannot be compromised because of it."

More than three decades later, for protecting its honour and dignity, the Supreme Court must forthwith terminate the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar's electoral roll. Such a step would entail conducting this year's Assembly elections in Bihar on the basis of the electoral roll that was revised and updated in January. This electoral roll suffers from imperfections, but it will not trigger mass disenfranchisement, which will almost certainly happen with the one produced through the SIR process.

As the custodian of the Constitution, mass disenfranchisement cannot but compromise the Supreme Court's dignity and honour, for it didn't stay the SIR exercise at its inception. Another month of the SIR and it will likely become a fait accompli in Bihar.

The SIR's singular contribution, as of now, has been to produce a draft electoral roll that has 65 lakh voters less than the one updated in January. Their names were deleted on the grounds that they were either dead or have shifted out of the state or were enrolled more than once. The mammoth scale of deletions wouldn't have been looked at askance, but for the many discoveries that those marked dead are alive.

Among the countless errors found in the draft roll, the most damaging to the Election Commission of India's credentials is the finding of The Reporters' Collective that more than 5000 voters in Bihar's Valmikinagar constituency are also registered in Uttar Pradesh. All of them have two different Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) numbers in the two states, raising the spectre of bogus voting. This finding is particularly damaging because it bolsters Congress leader Rahul Gandhi's allegation that the ECI deliberately enables multiple registrations of voters for bumping up the Bharatiya Janata Party's votes through bogus voting.

The Reporters' Collective said it couldn't determine whether the bogus or ghost voters of Valmikinagar were registered during the SIR, or were already present on the January roll. It's possible that the SIR's draft roll has inherited the egregious mistakes from the previous voter list, though deleting 65 lakh names is ECI officials' doing.

It isn't surprising why, in Bihar, the Opposition prefers the voter list of January over the final one that the SIR will produce. The former may have bogus voters, but it, at least, contains lakhs of voters whom the SIR threatens to disenfranchise. Simply put, the Opposition fears the SIR-generated electoral roll will hit them with the double whammy of bogus voters and wrongful deletion of legitimate voters.

The Opposition's preference is also influenced by its belief that the ECI favours the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. The ECI's conduct reinforces their belief. It sprang the SIR on Bihar without consulting the Opposition. It linked citizenship to the right to vote. It excluded widely available documents, such as the Aadhaar, from being furnished as proof of citizenship. Worse, the SIR's timeline of 90 days is in sharp contrast to the eight months the ECI took for conducting a similar exercise in 2003.

It'd seem the ECI wants to rush voters through the SIR process before they can legally block it. The ECI seems to be having its way, stoking confusion as it presses forward with the SIR. For instance, it hasn't unequivocally stated whether the Supreme Court's order that the Aadhaar must be accepted for the SIR applies only to the 65 lakh voters absent from the draft roll or to every person in Bihar.

It can very well be argued that during the claims and objections phase of the SIR, beginning today, the errors in the SIR's draft roll would be rectified. Given the sheer scale of the errors, the 25 days allocated for correcting them are decidedly insufficient. Compounding this problem is the ECI's cumbersome method for challenging exclusion. It requires voters to spend time and money to travel to the offices of election officers in block and district towns and the Capital city to have their exclusion reversed. It's moot whether poor voters, running into millions, would expend their scarce resources to retain their right to vote.

The SIR's design is so inherently undemocratic that it shouldn't have been executed in this form. The final electoral roll will be published on September 30, a month or so before Bihar is expected to go to the polls. It's unlikely that at this late stage the Supreme Court would be able to reverse disenfranchisement of a high magnitude in case it happens, as is being predicted. Ineffectual would the Supreme Court be then proved in checking the brazen trampling of democratic norms. Marred would be its honour and dignity, about which Justice Ahmadi and Justice Bharucha waxed eloquent.

The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste

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