The Supreme Court of India on Monday ordered in a major order that the Aadhaar card be considered the 12th valid document during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process of the Bihar electoral roll. This decision was arrived at following an announcement to the court by the Election Commission of India (ECI) that Aadhaar will be deemed to determine the identity of a person in order to be included or not in the revised list of voters.
The SIR exercise has been dominated by controversy, given that it first identified 11 identity documents but omitted the Aadhaar. Opposition parties strongly criticised this omission and accused the process of being manipulated to skew the voter lists of supporters of the ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its supporters in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA).
The Supreme Court made it clear that Aadhaar can be utilised to identify, but can not be regarded as citizenship evidence. The police will have the right to inspect the validity and authenticity of the Aadhaar cards and accept them. The ECI has been instructed to come out with formal guidelines as to whether Aadhaar is included.
Prior to this, the EC announced on August 18 that it had deleted approximately 65 lakh names of its draft electoral roll in the state of Bihar during the SIR exercise. This brought on more political controversy with the issue of disenfranchisement and equity in the process.
On July 28, the highest court refused to prevent the EC from publishing the draft rules on August 1 but proposed that Aadhaar and EPIC should be taken into account. This notwithstanding, Aadhaar was omitted until Monday’s order. In the September 1 hearing, the court referred to the confusion as a trust issue and asked the state legal service authority to volunteer paralegals to help voters and political parties make claims and objections.
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