Former EC Ashok Lavasa questions fairness of SIR
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Photo: PTI
New Delhi: Former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa on Thursday (September 3) questioned the fairness of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, describing it as an example of a “might is right” approach being adopted by statutory institutions.
Speaking at the Prof. Jagdeep Singh Chhokar Memorial Lecture organised by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) in New Delhi, Lavasa said that while the SIR exercise was legally valid, serious questions remained over whether the procedure was fair.
Lavasa argued that institutions vested with legal authority increasingly appeared to assume that whatever action they took was inherently justified. He cited the SIR as an example, saying that what he considered an unfair procedure had been imposed on millions of people and subsequently upheld by the judiciary, The Wire reported.
He stressed that justice should not be limited to enforcing the letter of the law but must also protect its underlying spirit. In this context, he questioned how the deletion of around 13 crore names from the electoral rolls could be justified.
Lavasa also warned that such measures could discourage people from participating in democratic processes. He pointed out that around 33% of the electorate does not vote, while the highest turnout recorded in a Lok Sabha election has been about 67%. Making the electoral process increasingly difficult, he said, could create widespread anxiety over citizens’ constitutional right to vote, something he said had not happened on such a scale in the past.
As reported by The Wire, draft electoral rolls released for the third phase of the SIR showed that 6.15 crore names had been removed from voter lists across 17 states and Union territories. Although the figures could change when the final rolls are published, the scale of the deletions has renewed questions over the validity of the electoral rolls that existed before the revision exercise.
In Maharashtra, deletions in the published list amounted to about one-third of the total electors who voted in the 2024 Assembly elections. In Karnataka, names of nearly half of those who voted in the 2023 legislative assembly polls were deleted, while Telangana recorded deletions equivalent to slightly less than one-third of those who voted in the 2023 election.
Delhi recorded the highest deletion rate at 32.78%, followed by Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu at 29.65%, Telangana at 21.69%, Maharashtra at 21.14%, Karnataka at 19.48% and Arunachal Pradesh at 19.09%.