Top court asks EC to furnish details of 366k deleted voters

A day after the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the Bihar assembly poll schedule, the Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the commission to furnish information about the nearly 366,000 additional voters deleted from the final electoral rolls, while clarifying that it will not conduct any “roving inquiry” into the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls unless there is credible proof that genuine voters were wrongfully excluded.

- Utkarsh Anand

A bench of justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi directed ECI to collate details of the deletions and adjourned the hearing to October 9, observing that any further intervention at this stage would only be “in aid of the electoral process so that confidence in it is fortified.”

“The question of conducting any exercise before this court would arise only when there are some substantial number of examples. If we are prima facie satisfied that there is substance in the averments, we will look into it, but it cannot be a roving inquiry,” the bench said, responding to submissions by advocate Prashant Bhushan for petitioner NGO Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR).

Bhushan, appearing along with senior advocates Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Gopal Sankaranarayanan, and advocate Vrinda Grover, contended that SIR had led to a “disproportionate exclusion of women, Muslims and other vulnerable sections”. He pointed out that while the ECI had furnished the list of 6.5 million voters whose names were deleted during the draft stage after the court's earlier direction, it had not published the list of 366,000 additional deletions made after objections to draft rolls, nor issued “speaking orders” to those affected.