Supreme Court asked ECI- Why 65 lakh voters in Bihar? ADR’s petition on major action under SIR process. The commission will have to give the detail report by August 9, the hearing will be held on August 12-13.
Supreme Court on sir: Is the name of 65 lakh voters suddenly disappearing from the voter list in Bihar is just a ‘technical cleaning’ or is there a big democratic secret? This question is shocking the whole country today. Taking a serious stand on this, the Supreme Court has directed the Election Commission to present complete information by 9 August. The matter is now not only about data improvement, but is related to electoral transparency and protection of civil rights.
What is the secret of removing the names of 65 lakh voters?
The ‘Special intensive revision campaign (SIR), which started in Bihar from June 24, has now become a topic of discussion across the country. Out of 7.24 crore voters in the draft voter list released on August 1, the names of 65 lakh people were removed. The Election Commission says that these names belong to the deceased, permanent transfer and duplicate voters. But is it really like this?
On which grounds were these names removed?
The Supreme Court has questioned the Election Commission on what basis each name was removed-
- Was those voters dead?
- Are they shifted to another state?
- Or was they wrongly excluded?
A bench headed by Justice Suryakant said that complete information behind every name is necessary. Only the number will not work.
Why did AdR’s petition become the key to this dispute?
- The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) has filed a petition in the Supreme Court demanding that
- “The name of every deleted voter should be made public, and the reason for its removal should be clearly explained.”
- The AdR argues that giving a list to political parties should not be enough, but there should be complete transparency in the public domain.
What do Election Commission figures say?
EC told the court that:
- 22.34 lakh names removed due to death
- 36.28 lakh people permanently moved to another place
- 7.01 lakh names found duplicate
But the question is- was this investigation transparent? Did the verification of the deceased voters be locally or just on the data base?
Supreme Court’s final ultimatum-transparency is necessary
The Supreme Court has made it clear that if such a large number of names have been removed, the entire investigation and accountability will be fixed. The court said that “If the process of removing the name is not transparent, we will intervene.” At the same time, the court has insisted on considering the Aadhaar card and voter ID to be considered authentic documents, not to remove the name.