Deemed ineligible: On the Supreme Court and SIR

At Wednesday’s hearing of a petition on the Delhi SIR in the Supreme Court, Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked questions that cut to the heart of the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s SIR of electoral rolls. If an existing voter was “lax, inert or did not respond” to enumeration forms, was that a ground for the ECI to “forfeit his or her right to vote forever”? The Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said that the ECI was in “error” to force such voters, struck off for not returning enumeration forms, to reapply on Form 6 as if they were new voters. It asked why voters who had shifted residences could not just disclose details and why deleted voters could not fill enumeration forms belatedly. This is the central design flaw of the SIR as it shifts the burden of enrolment from the state to the elector, including those who have voted before, and treats a mere change of address as ground for deletion. The share of draft deletions recorded as “shifted” or “absent” rose from 55% in Bihar to 72% in States/Union Territories in Phase 3. In Karnataka, about 84 lakh electors were deleted, marked as “shifted” or “absent” during enumeration. But only a net of 8.2 lakh, including new electors, were added during the claims phase, with the final roll being 64.5 lakh short of the projected adult population. Requiring moved voters to re-register as fresh applicants defeats the ECI’s historic mandate of widening the franchise, which was inherent in the 2002-03 intensive revision, where enumerators enrolled shifted voters at their new homes and the Chief Electoral Officer reconciled the old entries.

Justice Bagchi also mentioned that the Bihar judgment was not a “binding precedent” and that the legality of “logical discrepancy” checks, allowed only as an “interim arrangement” in West Bengal, had not been finally adjudicated. No statute or rule provides for judging a voter’s eligibility on the basis of family size or the age gap between voters and parents, which were two of the ECI’s ludicrous and algorithm-driven “logical discrepancy” checks. In West Bengal these checks resulted in massive disenfranchisement and The Hindu’s analysis found that in Delhi, Muslims were disproportionately flagged. But the Court should not merely issue managerial fixes such as extended deadlines or displaying printed lists in blocks, as it has in the past. The final SIR rolls are erroneous as deletions flowed from a flawed design rather than just lapses by the ECI. The dead and duplicate entries that the SIR identified should be removed and newly eligible electors added. Voters wrongly removed from draft rolls must be included again. The larger questions over the Commission’s SIR conduct and how its members are appointed must also be settled.