• Source:JND
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As the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) continues to remain a contentious issue in national politics, the Supreme Court on Wednesday reasoned whether the 'intruders' who may have Aadhaar cards to avail social security benefits should be allowed to vote.

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, while hearing the arguments on the petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the electoral roll revision exercises, said, "Aadhaar card is the creation of a statute (and valid) to the extent that it acknowledges the benefits or privileges based upon it. Nobody can dispute that. After all, an Aadhaar card is prepared for a particular object and a particular statute. There can’t be any dispute on that."

During the argument, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who is representing Kerala and West Bengal in the case, raised an issue that despite possessing Aadhaar, the voters are being excluded.

To this, CJI Kant asked, "Suppose there are persons who intrude from a different country, from neighbouring countries they come to India, they are working in India, staying in India, somebody working as a poor rickshaw-puller, somebody working as a labourer on a construction site, if you issue an Aadhaar card to him so that he can avail benefit of subsidised ration or for any benefit, that’s something part of our constitutional ethos, that is our constitutional morality. But does it mean that because he has been given this benefit, he must now be made a voter also?"

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Sibal, however, pressed on due process established by the court. He argued, "There is a presumption. A self-declaration, I am a citizen. I live here. There is an Aadhaar card that I have. That’s my residence. You want to take it away, take it away through a process. And that process must be established before Your Lordship."

The CJI then cited the example of Bihar SIR and said there were very few objections. "If there are instances where a person is a bonafide resident, a citizen of India, if he has been excluded, we have been eagerly, desperately looking for those instances so that we could rectify the procedural error," he said.

Lauding the media's role in reporting the issue every day, CJI Kant said, "Sometimes we should give full credit to the media also. For Bihar SIR, every day there were media reports. If any person sitting in the remotest area is aware that something is happening, a list is being prepared, a new voter list is coming out, then can someone say I was not aware of what happened?".

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Emphasising the unethical nature of shifting the burden onto voters, Sibal added, "I am only on the process, which should be inclusive. Any attempt to shift the burden to the elector to do something to prove a fact is inconsistent with our constitutional culture, from before Independence."

To prove his point, Sibal argued that there is software to find and weed out duplicate voters and that there is no need to give Booth Level Officers (BLOs) the deletion power.

On Sbal's argument, Justice Bagchi said software can only remove duplicate voters, not dead ones. "It all depends on the political gradient. One political party, which is stronger takes all the dead voters and they are voted in. We don’t judge in a vacuum. That is why the dead voters need to be weeded out. Therefore, it is not party A or party B… If the power gradient is for party A, all the dead voters will vote for party A."

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