Supreme Court query on voting rights: NRC

Guwahati: The Supreme Court of India on Tuesday asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) to explain as to how it will deal with people who make it to the voters list in Assam but are excluded from National Register of Citizen (NRC) in Assam.

The bench headed by Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, who said that they are not concerned with elections, also asked the ECI to present data about the addition and deletion of names in the voters list revised in the month of January of 2017, 2018, and 2019.

The bench comprising Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, Justice S.A. Nazeer, and Justice Sanjeev Khanna also directed the commission to clarify what action the commission would take to reconcile the voters list with the final NRC to be published on July 31.

The court has sought clarification from the commission in the wake of two petitioners who complained that their names were taken off the voters list because they didn’t make it to an early version of the NRC.

The judges also asked election officials to come back with Assam’s electoral rolls for the last three years to explain how the commission had gone about updating the voters list relating to deletion and addition of names.

Two Assam-based residents, Gopal Seth who hails from North 24 Parganas in West Bengal and Susanta Sen of Sibsagar in Assam, had petitioned that they had voted in previous election. According to the petition, their names had been deleted from the draft of the NRC. The petitioners have said that deletion of their names is erroneous as they have already filed their objections with the state coordinator for NRC, who is finalising the list.

They argue that deletion of their names from the voters list for Sibsagar on the basis of the National Register of Citizen amounted to a violation of their constitutional right to vote. “The right to vote of a citizen is a statutory right,” the petition said.