SC issues notice to Election Commission on fresh petitions against SIR in Kerala, UP and other states

The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Election Commission on fresh petitions challenging Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in different states on various grounds.

A Bench of Justice Surya Kant, Justice SVN Bhatti and Justice Joymalya Bagchi agreed to hear fresh petitions challenging the SIR exercise in Kerala, Uttar Pradesh and other states after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing a petitioner challenging SIR exercise in Kerala, said local body elections were scheduled in the state.

The Bench directed the petitions against SIR exercise in Kerala to be listed on November 26, while rest of the petitions relating to other states will be taken up in the first or second week of December.

A Bench led by Justice Kant, which is seized of petitions challenging the validity of the poll panel’s notifications for SIR in Bihar and 12 other states/UTs, had refused to stay the EC SIR exercise in Bihar.

On November 11, it had sought separate responses from the poll panel on petitions filed by DMK, CPI(M), West Bengal Congress and Trinamool Congress leaders challenging the SIR of the electoral rolls in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, respectively.

The 12 states and UTs where SIR exercise is being conducted are Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal.

While the Election Commission’s June 24 notification on SIR is already under challenge, the DMK has also challenged the poll panel’s October 27 notification on SIR, describing it as “constitutional overreach” on the ground that the poll panel lacked the authority to implement it.

Asserting that the Bihar SIR exercise was “accurate”, the poll panel had on October 16 told the top court that the petitioner NGOs and political parties were merely content with making “false allegations” to discredit the exercise. Not a single appeal had been filed by any voter against alleged name deletion since the publication of the final electoral roll, it said.

It had denied the allegation of the petitioners that there was a “disproportionate exclusion of Muslims” from the final electoral roll of the state prepared after the months-long SIR exercise.