The Supreme Court of India.
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New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Bihar State Legal Service Authority to issue directions to its district-level bodies to assist 3.66 lakh voters excluded from the final electoral rolls in filing appeals with the Election Commission.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymlaya Bagchi refused to pass any blanket order on the exclusions and inclusions in the voter list.
The court said that the district legal service authority will release a list of para-legal volunteers for assisting the excluded voters by filing appeals and ensuring that they have detailed orders of their name's rejection.
The court found “too much passion and little reason” in the arguments of petitioners’ challenging the 'special intensive revision' of voter list before the Bihar election.
The bench cited the absence of appeals by people allegedly wrongfully struck off from the electoral roll. The court pointed out that there were discrepancies in the affidavits submitted before it by certain individuals who claimed to have been wrongly excluded from the voter list.
The bench said that it expected the political parties to come out with their grievances with regard to the SIR exercise after they were impleaded in the matter, but they appear to be satisfied.
Senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing the EC, pointed out that the petitioner NGO, 'Association for Democratic Reforms', has given fake details of a person, who claimed that his name had been excluded from the final list.
The EC’s counsel said that the name referred to in the NGO's affidavit did not feature in the draft roll and the details he had given were of some woman.
"We wonder if such a person even exists," the bench said, after examining the EC’s response.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the NGO, stressed that details have been given to him by a very responsible person and the name of the elector, who claimed that his name did not feature in the final electoral roll of Bihar, can be ascertained by the district legal service authority.
Dwivedi said the NGO must satisfy itself with the affidavit before bringing it to the court’s attention, and the NGO and other petitioner Yogendra Yadav have filed their affidavits till late afternoon and his client needs to file its response.
Bhushan said the court may ask the legal services authority to make an inquiry into it and give a report.
“It is a responsibility to hand over a document across the Bar and this responsibility you have to take,” the bench told Bhushan.
The court said, if a person is not found to be residing at this address, then it is wrong or false, and the description, the voter number, belongs to a woman.
Bhushan said he has another 20 affidavits.
“We are not into the business of inquiry," the bench said, adding the EC has demonstrated that the facts in the affidavit are incorrect.
The bench asked Bhushan, why can’t these people, who approach him, cannot move before the legal services authority, which is a neutral platform.
Activist Yogendra Yadav, one of the petitioners, argued that SIR has led to the largest ever shrinkage of electoral rolls, and 47 lakh is the shrinkage that has happened. He said that 45,000 of gibberish names are there. Dwivedi strongly opposed these submissions.
The court fixed October 16 as next date of hearing on a batch of pleas challenging validity of the Bihar SIR.