Supreme Court to pronounce verdict on Bihar SIR tomorrow

The Supreme Court is scheduled to pronounce judgment on Wednesday (May 27) on a batch of petitions challenging the constitutionality of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, which kickstarted in Bihar.

A Bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi had reserved the case for verdict in January.

The petitions, filed by NGO Association for Democratic Reforms and others, had accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of arbitrarily assuming powers to “determine citizenship” while overriding limitations clearly prescribed in parliamentary laws, rules and its own manual without providing “any good reason”.

The Supreme Court judgment on the questions of constitutionality of the Bihar SIR would have an impact on further rounds of SIR. A second phase of SIR had been held ahead of polls in several States, including West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Assam.

Inclusion of Aadhaar

The Bihar SIR hearings had seen the Supreme Court effectively intervene to make the massive exercise more inclusive. One of the effective judicial interventions was to include Aadhaar as the 12th in the list of 11 ‘indicative’ documents that voters could file as proof of their identity or residence.

The hearings had also seen the court remind the ECI that “the degree of transparency and access to information form the hallmarks of an open democracy”.

The apex court had pushed the poll body to publish the names and details of voters added to the final electoral roll in the Bihar SIR.

The final list in Bihar had shown the total tally of eligible voters in the State as 7.42 crore. The court had directed the ECI to publish a district-wise, booth-level searchable list of the nearly 65 lakh voters who were purged from the draft roll, along with the exact reasons for their deletion from the list. 

Incidentally, the second phase of the SIR, which had covered 51 crore voters in 12 States and Union Territories, had commenced even as the Bihar challenge on the question of constitutionality of the SIR exercise was still pending in the Supreme Court.