Was citizenship on your mind when SIR started: SC asks EC

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Election Commission of India whether it had thought of determining citizenship while issuing the order for conducting special intensive revision (SIR), pointing out that the poll panel had cited migration, urbanisation and updation of entries as the dominant reasons for the revision of electoral roll.

- Abraham Thomas

“When you started this exercise, was citizenship in your mind or are you second-guessing it as a reason to begin this exercise?” a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and justice Joymalya Bagchi asked the poll panel. The court was hearing a batch of petitions from last year challenging the June 24 notification for SIR in Bihar.

Senior advocates Rakesh Dwivedi and Maninder Singh, representing ECI, submitted that SIR exercise had not been undertaken since 2003 in Bihar and was conducted in response to changing demographic realities, including urbanisation and migration. For the past 20 years, summary revision of rolls was carried periodically that required voters to give a “self-declaration” of their citizenship without any intrusive scrutiny of their claim, Dwivedi argued.