Supreme Court orders ECI to publicise details of deleted Bihar voters
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New Delhi: The Supreme Court directed the Election Commission of India (ECI) on Thursday to accept the Aadhaar card as an acceptable document for proving identity in the Bihar Assembly polls. A day ago, the court had said that Aadhaar cannot be taken as a conclusive document for citizenship.
The court also directed the poll body to publish details of voters removed from the electoral rolls and the reason for their deletion, Times of India reported.
The top court bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymala Bagchi observed that transparency is needed about 65 lakh deleted voters to enable people to seek clarification or correction.
The court further instructed the poll body, which is facing allegations of severe irregularities in conducting polls, in favour of the BJP, to display printed booth-wise lists of deleted voters along with reasons for their deletion, at panchayat and block development offices. The court bench asked the poll body to publish the reasons for the deletions through newspapers, radio, and television.
The ECI is instructed to make the district-wise deletion lists available at the office of the Chief Electoral Officer. EC also has to upload the data on its official website by Tuesday.
After this is done, the soft copies of the deleted voters' list will be available on the district electoral officer's website, which will be searchable.
On Wednesday, ECI claimed that no political party has lodged any objections or complaints so far regarding the inclusion or exclusion of voters from the electoral rolls in Bihar, nearly two weeks after the publication of draft rolls under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise.
In its routine bulletin on the contentious drive, the EC noted that more than 17,000 individuals have directly approached the poll panel to register complaints. It added that 74,525 people have applied for inclusion in the rolls, including six who turned 18 after the draft rolls were published on 1 August and who submitted their forms through Booth Level Agents (BLAs).