Former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa said that the Constitution of India originally rested on a presumption of citizenship and its continuance, and that this “Constitutional imagination” had shaped the earliest general elections in India’s history as a republic that took place in 1951-52. He described the Election Commission of India (ECI) as a distinctive institution, starkly different to other institutions of governance that were more directly connected in various ways with incumbent ruling regimes.
He pointed out that Article 326 of the Constitution provided the fundamental conditions for a person’s qualification as a voter. Against this background, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls raised serious Constitutional concerns. Lavasa questioned the justification advanced before the Supreme Court of India that a wholesale revision of electoral rolls was necessary and wondered what concrete material supported such an assertion. Had the ECI in the past not prepared accurate electoral rolls?
The former Election Commissioner said that the main unanswered questions were whether the SIR had in fact removed persons ineligible under Article 326, how many such persons had been identified, and whether any of them had thereafter been referred to Foreigners Tribunals or other competent processes. He asserted that the ECI was defending the SIR exercise in an abstract manner, without disclosing any data to assess whether such an exercise was needed and in such a hurry. Lavasa further noted that electoral rolls had been prepared only months before the SIR exercise and questioned the logic of thereafter treating voters differently, depending on when they were enrolled in the rolls.
