The Supreme Court on Tuesday observed that the Election Commission of India is correct in saying that Aadhar can’t be accepted as conclusive proof of citizenship.
Hearing a batch of petitions challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise in Bihar, the top court said, “See the Election Commission is correct in saying that Aadhar can’t be accepted as conclusive proof of citizenship; it has to be verified. See section 9 of the Aadhaar Act.”
The observation holds significance as the petitioners have been demanding the inclusion of Aadhar among the verification documents required under the SIR exercise.
However, the petitioners argued that the Election Commission of India has no authority to determine the citizenship.
Earlier, the petitioners flagged the anomalies in the ongoing SIR exercise and the draft voter list released by the Commission on August 1.
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for the petitioners, said that 12 living voters were wrongly marked ‘dead’ in the draft electoral rolls published by the poll panel on August 1.
In response, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, representing the Commission, said this is just a draft roll and such large exercises are bound to have some errors. “Such a large exercise shall have some error here and there. But saying dead is alive, etc, is not good,” he said.
Sibal responded, saying each booth has this kind of error. “This is not fair,” he said.
On this, the bench said, “Where are the aggrieved persons? Please give us a list. If a person is stated to be dead but is alive, we will take them (ECI) to task.”
Justice Dwivedi, however, argued thaat such errors can be rectified by booth level officers (BLOs). “One need not come to court every third day citing instances of 12 people marked as dead but found alive, or vice versa,” he added.