Challenge against SIR process in Bihar, Supreme Court will give its decision today, decision was reserved on January 29

The Supreme Court will give its verdict on Wednesday on a group of petitions in which the ‘Special Intensive Revision’ (SIR) process of the voter list in Bihar has been challenged. In these petitions, it was claimed that under Article 326 of the Constitution, ‘Representation of the People Act, 1950’ and the rules made thereunder, the Election Commission does not have the powers to conduct SIR on such a large scale.

A bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant had reserved its decision on these petitions after a long hearing on January 29. These included a petition filed by the famous NGO ‘Association for Democratic Reforms’ (ADR). The first phase of the SIR process has been completed in Bihar.

The final debate started on August 12

The Supreme Court started the final arguments on this case on August 12 last year. Then the court had said that inclusion or deletion of names in the voter list comes under the constitutional jurisdiction of the Election Commission. After the SIR process, the Election Commission had released the list of names of 65 lakh people, who were removed from the draft voter list published later.

According to the SIR notification, voters who were not present in the voter list of 2002 or 2003 had to prove their ‘ancestral relationship’ with someone present in the list at that time. The Election Commission had then defended the SIR process by arguing that Aadhaar card and Voter ID card cannot be considered as ‘concrete evidence’ of citizenship.

Questions on the timeline of the process also

In the petitions filed by the petitioners, it was also alleged that this amendment of the voter list is an “NRC-like process”, under which the Election Commission is checking the citizenship, whereas only the Central Government has this right.

Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for ADR, had raised questions on the deadline set to complete this entire process. Apart from this, he had also raised questions on the data related to 65 lakh voters who were either declared ‘dead’, or were considered ‘migrants’, or were shown registered in some other constituency.