New Delhi: The Supreme Court Friday declined to grant relief to 66 polling officials and five citizens who were dropped from West Bengal’s electoral rolls after Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, directing them instead to approach the Appellate Tribunals set up in the state.
A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi was hearing an Article 32 writ petition filed by the 71 petitioners, seeking to be allowed to vote in the ongoing West Bengal assembly election.
Dismissing the plea, Chief Justice Kant told petitioners to place their arguments before the Appellate Tribunals. Justice Bagchi later said: “This election, we understand (they can’t vote). The more valuable right to remain on the rolls, we will examine.”
West Bengal held its first phase of polling Thursday; the second and final phase is scheduled for 29 April.
The 66 government employees among the petitioners had been formally appointed as first polling officers and presiding officers by district election officers (DEOs) under Section 26 of the Representation of the People Act, 1951.
Their appointments, dated 16 March, were made after the publication of the revised electoral roll by the Election Commission on 28 February.
Crucially, each appointment order by the DEO recorded the petitioners’ EPIC (electoral photo identity card) number—a unique number assigned to every registered voter.
Senior advocate MR Shamshad, representing the petitioners, argued that this created an indefensible contradiction: the Election Commission had relied on those very EPIC numbers to appoint the 66 petitioners to election duty while excluding them as voters from the revised voter rolls.
The petition, filed by advocate-on-record Aditya Samaddar, said that “it is not open to the Election Commission to approbate and reprobate to rely upon the EPIC numbers” of the 66 petitioners as valid credentials for appointment to election duty, while treating the same EPIC numbers as representing entries (proxies) on a voter roll from which “the petitioners have been lawfully excluded”.
“The EPIC number is indivisible. It cannot be valid for one statutory purpose and void for another arising out of the same instrument,” the petition read.
The petitioners invoked Rule 17(c) of the Conduct of Elections Rules, 1961, which defines a “voter on election duty” as “any polling agent, any polling officer, presiding officer or other public servant, who is an elector in the constituency and is by reason of his being on election duty unable to vote at the polling station where he is entitled to vote”.
Rule 18 of the Rules mandated that such a voter on election duty shall vote through postal ballot at a facilitation centre. “This provision is mandatory in nature and operates notwithstanding other provisions,” the petitioners said.
They also highlighted that Rule 35A allows public servants on election duty to vote at a different polling station than the one where they may be registered.
On the question of remedy, the petition argued that the harm was irreversible: “An election once held cannot be re-held. The Appellate Tribunals may restore the petitioners’ names only after the election has concluded.”
Their constitutional right under Article 326 (right to vote) to participate in choosing their elected representatives would thereby be “permanently extinguished for this electoral cycle”, it argued.
Appellate Tribunals were constituted by a Supreme Court order of 10 March and began functioning on 13 April.
Last week, the Supreme Court had directed the Election Commission to add AT-cleared voters to revised electoral rolls 48 hours before each polling day. Of 3.4 million aggrieved voters, 136 names were cleared by the tribunals before the first phase of polling in West Bengal Thursday. An estimated 27 lakh names have been removed from the revised electoral rolls of the state since SIR was carried out.
The exercise to revise electoral rolls began with Bihar last year, and has since covered several states, including Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where polling was conducted this month.
SIR has turned into a controversial issue, with Opposition parties accusing the Election Commission and the ruling BJP at the Centre of disenfranchising millions of voters from minority and marginalised communities.
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