A hearing was going on whether it was right or wrong to conduct it across the country. Many senior lawyers including Kapil Sibal were presenting arguments from the opposition side. Claims were being made that names of lakhs of people were being excluded. The names of certain people are being deleted as part of a conspiracy. But then Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant asked such a question that Sibal could not answer. CJI said, claims were made in Bihar that names of lakhs of people were being deleted. We were also scared that this might actually be happening. So we sent paralegal volunteers, but not a single person came there. No one said that his name had been struck off by mistake. Meaning, the people whose names were deleted had either died, or had gone to migrate or were duplicate voters. From this we inferred that the work was done properly in Bihar.
A petition has been filed against the SIR in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Bench Association for Democratic Reforms and all the opposition leaders. In this, questions have been raised on the entire process of SIR. Importantly, this hearing is not about conducting or stopping SIR in any state. In this, major legal questions related to SIR are being debated. Senior advocate Kapil Sibal and Prashant Bhushan, appearing for RJD MP Manoj Jha, gave many arguments, but the CJI’s reply raised questions on their own questions.
CJI said, we saw a strange thing in Bihar. We kept giving instructions, sent our paralegal volunteers…no one came forward to say that I was thrown out.
CJI asked, initially the impression was given about Bihar that names of lakhs of people were going to be removed…we too were afraid…what happened after all?
Justice Bagchi also asked the same question, despite all the claims the names were removed, but we did not find any impact on the ground level and not a single voter raised any challenge. It was clear from the reporting that even people from far away places knew about it.
On the process of SIR…
The Supreme Court also said, you used to say that people do not know about this process, but large-scale media reporting confirmed that even people from far away places were fully aware about this process. CJI asked, can anyone say about that process that I was not aware of?
Sibal’s questions
Earlier, Kapil Sibal had said in the beginning that the decision taken by the Supreme Court on SIR will decide the fate of democracy in India. He even said that this never happened after independence. Any exclusionary exercise in election administration was considered unconstitutional because the purpose of our democratic framework was to increase inclusion. He also said that there are lakhs of such voters in the country, especially illiterate or rural residents, who will not be able to fill the form and there will be a danger of their names being wrongly deleted. The booth level officer will doubt the citizenship and will check the documents and decide that it is not in his power.
