The Supreme Court on Tuesday said the results of the ongoing “special intensive revision” of Bihar’s voter list could be set aside as late as September if illegality is proven.
The court was hearing petitions
challenging the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) voter re-verification exercise, which is being carried out months before the Assembly election in the state. Petitioners have called it “an exercise of mass exclusion” and argued that the poll body has no power to determine citizenship.
The Supreme Court said the ECI was correct in stating that Aadhaar cannot be treated as conclusive proof of citizenship. On complaints that some voters had been marked as dead, the court said this could be due to an “inadvertent error” in updating records. The petitioners had produced in court two individuals they said had been declared dead in the voter rolls.
They questioned the constitutional basis of the poll body seeking additional documents from voters, excluding Aadhaar and voter ID, to prove eligibility.
The ECI dismissed the petitioners’ claims as speculative and pointed out that no political party or individual voter had approached the court over the issue. The bench also remarked it was a “sweeping argument” to suggest that no one in Bihar possessed the required documents.