'Voter-friendly': Supreme Court counters petitioners challenging Bihar SIR

Senior Advocate Abhishek Singhvi was arguing before the bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.

The Supreme Court, which was hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) decision to conduct a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in poll-bound Bihar, on Friday said it appears to be a "case of trust deficit".

Senior Advocate Abhishek Singhvi was arguing before the bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi.

Disagreeing with the petitioner's argument that the EC's document check exercise is an "anti-voter" and exclusionary move, the top court said bench said, "Documents required from elector in SIR are 11 compared to 7 considered in summary revision of electoral roll, shows it is voter friendly."

Singhvi, appearing for the petitioners, disagreed and submitted the number of documents may be high but they had the least coverage. Giving an example of passport availability with the electors, Singhvi said it was only one to two per cent in Bihar and they have no provision for permanent resident certificates given in the state.

"If we see the availability of documents with the population in Bihar it can be seen the coverage is very low," he said. The bench said the coverage of 36 lakh of passport holders in the state appears to be good.

"The list of documents is prepared normally after taking feedback from various government departments to ensure maximum coverage," Justice Bagchi said.

On August 12, the top court said inclusion and exclusion of citizens or non-citizens from the electoral rolls was within the remit of the Election Commission and backed its stand to not accept Aadhaar and voter cards as conclusive proof of citizenship in the SIR of voters' list in Bihar.

As the row over the ongoing SIR escalated inside and outside Parliament, the top court also observed that the dispute was "largely a trust deficit issue” since the Election Commission(EC) has claimed that roughly 6.5 crore people of the total 7.9 crore voting population in poll-bound Bihar didn't have to file any documents for them or their parents featured in the 2003 electoral rolls.

The draft roll was published on August 1, with the final list scheduled for release on September 30, amid Opposition allegations that the exercise will disenfranchise crores of eligible voters.