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Supreme Court SIR Case: The Supreme Court has sought answers from the Center and the Election Commission regarding the CAA Citizenship Act, the deadline for SIR in UP and SR in place of SIR in Assam. The next hearing will be held on 16 December.
New Delhi. The Supreme Court has taken a serious stand on the concerns raised regarding the citizenship process of people eligible under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in the country and the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of voter lists in many states. The apex court on Tuesday issued notices on three separate petitions and sought answers from the Central Government and the Election Commission.
The first petition states that people of Hindu, Buddhist and Christian communities living in India for a long time are entitled to citizenship under CAA. Many of these people have also applied for citizenship, but no decision has been taken yet in their cases. The petitioner claims that due to this delay, the risk of his name not being included in the voter list during the SIR process has increased. On this issue, the Supreme Court has issued a notice to the Central Government and the Election Commission and sought their response.
The second petition has been filed by Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU) Azad Trust. It has been said that the time of 4 weeks given for the ongoing SIR process in Uttar Pradesh is administratively completely inadequate. It has been argued in the petition that there are 15.35 crore voters in UP. In such a large state, it is impossible to complete the SIR process in just four weeks. Due to less time, there is a danger of deletion of names of legitimate voters on a large scale.
The Trust also said that it had earlier sent a proposal to the Election Commission to extend the time, but no action was taken. Only after this had to knock the door of the Supreme Court. Now the Supreme Court has also issued a notice to the Election Commission on this. The next hearing on this petition will be on 16 December.
The third case is related to Assam. Here the decision to conduct only Special Revision (SR) instead of SIR has been challenged. The petitioner says that in a sensitive state like Assam, the process of SIR is important and replacing it with SR will give rise to many anomalies. The Supreme Court has also issued a notice to the Election Commission on this petition. The next hearing in this case also will be held on December 16.
