From Our Legal Correspondent
Mumbai: The Bombay High Court’s Goa bench has told the Election Commission of India that a draft roll under the Special Intensive Revision cannot, by itself, justify deleting a name, and that an electoral software system cannot be pleaded in place of the law. Hearing six members of a Santa Cruz family whose names were removed after they shifted house inside the same Assembly constituency, Justices Amit S. Jamsandekar and Valmiki Menezes said they were “very perturbed” by the Commission’s explanation that ERONET left officials with no option but to reject the applications.
The petitioners, led by Paresh Salgaonkar, had filed Form 8 on the Booth Level Officer’s advice to update their address. When the forms were processed, their Electors Photo Identity Card particulars were not traceable on ERONET. The only path the software offered was rejection. The names were deleted, and the family was effectively told to return as fresh electors through Form 6. The court refused that sequence. “He was never a new voter. He was an existing voter. He became new for your system,” the bench said, adding that Form 6, Form 7 and Form 8 would otherwise have no meaning.
The sharper point, still at the stage of oral observations on September 30 rather than a final judgment, is about the hierarchy of norms. Questioning the Commission on the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and the Registration of Electors Rules, the judges said the SIR instructions had, in practice, suspended the statutory scheme. Section 22, which governs correction of entries, and Rule 21A were treated as if they ceased to operate once the software had spoken. “SIR effectively by whatever instructions, has suspended the full system… and says forget about all the laws. Now you follow the software. It cannot be like this,” the bench said. A revision, the court indicated, must sit within Rule 13 read with Section 22. It may be intensive, and it may be repeated, but it cannot put the Act and the Rules in abeyance or invent a procedure alien to them.
On deletion, the bench was direct. “Show us from the Act… what empowers you to delete without hearing?” If a name is proposed to be removed, the person must first be heard. Officers who recorded that “the system has rejected” had, in the court’s view, abdicated the duty to apply their mind. Counsel for the Commission, Gaurish Agni, said there was no intention to delete anyone deliberately, and that similarly placed electors had been restored after filing Form 6. The bench was not persuaded that a fresh application cures a deletion made without notice. The Electoral Registration Officer was asked to be present. The court also wondered aloud how many others, similarly deleted, had not come to court.
Those observations travel beyond Santa Cruz. They restate three propositions other High Courts are likely to treat as persuasive, even if not binding outside Bombay. First, a draft roll under SIR is a stage in revision, not a source of power to disenfranchise. Second, the right to be heard is embedded in the correction and deletion scheme; a portal constraint does not displace it. Third, an existing elector who has only shifted residence cannot be converted into a new applicant because the database failed to retrieve an EPIC. Petitions over mass deletions, non-service of notices, and mismatches between field inquiry and ERONET entries can now cite this hearing for the limited point that administrative instructions and portal design are subordinate to the Act and the Rules. The Commission will have to show, in each case, the statutory gateway used for deletion and the hearing actually afforded.
The political fallout is immediate because SIR is no longer a back-office exercise. Opposition parties have argued that intensive revision, especially where deletions run into large numbers, risks selective disenfranchisement ahead of elections. The Commission has maintained that the exercise is meant to clear duplicate, shifted and ineligible entries, and that claims and objections remain open. The Goa bench does not adjudicate that charge. What it does is narrow the Commission’s defence. An answer that officials were helpless before the software will be difficult to repeat in Bihar, West Bengal or elsewhere once a constitutional court has called that approach a suspension of the Act. Parties that have defended SIR as routine purification will be pressed to explain why an address correction inside the same constituency produced a deletion. Opposition parties will treat the remark about those who have not come to court as validation of a wider grievance, and will seek disclosure of deletion orders, notice registers and ERONET rejection logs.
None of this freezes SIR. The court accepted that revisions can be held. It insisted only that they cannot overwrite Section 22, the Rules, or the hearing that must precede removal. If the Commission aligns portal options with Form 8, records reasons independent of the software, and serves notice before deletion, the legal attack loses force. If field orders continue to say that the system rejected an existing elector, the Goa observations are likely to reappear, with little variation, in courtrooms across the country.
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