Supreme Court verdict on SIR raises more questions than it answers: Congress

NEW DELHI: Congress on Wednesday slammed the Supreme Court judgment on SIR for not mentioning a clutch of “major flaws and contradictions” in EC’s process that, it said, has “deprived crores of citizens” of voting rights. It said the judicial challenge by political parties and civil society pertained to flaws on part of EC’s conduct, and not about legal validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

Congress spokesman Abhishek Singhvi told a press conference that SIR has raised serious questions about credibility of elections, as up to 80% challenges to voters’ exclusion in West Bengal have been found to be successful till now. He said if this success rate holds, then millions of voters may have been deprived of their voting rights in the recent polls.

Singhvi said the judgment is riddled with contradictions as it did not mention glaring errors and flaws in the SIR process noticed over the past few months in different states. He said SC had ruled Aadhaar was not a proof of citizenship and EC could not adjudicate on it, but lakhs were excluded from rolls on the issue of citizenship based on 7-8 documents that SIR demanded like ration card, parents date of birth. Similarly, he said EC had imposed an excessively short deadline for SIR for crores of persons, which led to massive exclusions, while elections were held before they could be adjudicated upon.

“It is an issue that the court should have pondered over,” he remarked.

TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee said the SIR judgment was confined to the Bihar case and could not be treated as an all-India ruling, asserting issues raised in Bengal were "completely different."