The Supreme Court is due to hear a plea on 28 October asking the Election Commission to publish the list of Delhi voters who received notices during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, along with the reasons for each, according to Siasat. Advocate Prashant Bhushan mentioned the matter before a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi. The draft roll published on 31 August removed about 47.7 lakh names from a total of about 1.45 crore, and 33 lakh voters were flagged with notices. About 97.5 lakh voters remain in the draft roll, the verification deadline is 29 October and the final roll is due on 4 November, so the hearing comes at the last moment when the courts can still affect the outcome.
The argument that the exercise is lawful and workable is made by the court's own earlier rulings and by the Election Commission's reasons. On 27 May the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the Special Intensive Revision, and in July it said the exercise is limited to electoral purposes and cannot be used to decide citizenship or access to welfare. The Commission said that over 43.32 lakh of those removed had shifted or were absent during enumeration, over 2.82 lakh were deceased and over 1.41 lakh were enrolled in more than one place, which are ordinary reasons to clean a roll. The Delhi High Court has also held that the fear of making a false declaration by using Form 6 to restore a deleted name is misplaced, which gives deleted voters a route back.
The argument that safeguards are lacking starts with the scale and the secrecy. The petitioners say the Commission has not disclosed who received notices or on what grounds, and has not explained the category of logical discrepancies, so a voter cannot know why a name was flagged. Form 6 is designed for first-time registration, and former Chief Election Commissioner S. Y. Quraishi has said deleted voters cannot legally use it, so the route back is disputed. The Supreme Court itself directed in May that cases of exclusion must have ways of being adjudicated. With 47.7 lakh removed, about a third of the roll, and only a short window left, even a small share of wrongful deletions would affect lakhs of voters.
The case matters for Delhi's voters and for every state where the exercise is proceeding, since deletions decide who can vote in future elections. It also feeds a wider political argument, as protests demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar have continued in the capital since 2 October. A ruling that orders publication of the notice list would make the process more transparent, while a refusal would leave the burden on individual voters to prove their eligibility. The final roll on 4 November leaves only days between the hearing and the end of verification.
The Court has already approved the exercise but asked for routes of redress. Whether the Delhi plea adds disclosure of notices to those routes will matter more to voters than the legal question.
Featured image: The Supreme Court of India in New Delhi (file photo). Photo: Pinakpani, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.