SC Flags Aadhaar Misuse: “Would a Foreign Worker Become a Voter?”
Supreme Court draws red line on voter rolls amid nationwide revision row.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing final arguments in a cluster of high-stakes petitions challenging the Election Commission of India’s aggressive Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls across multiple states, delivering a categorical ruling that an Aadhaar Card can never be treated as irrefutable proof of Indian citizenship for the purpose of enrolment as a voter.
Led by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, the bench posed a series of piercing hypotheticals to underscore the distinction: if a migrant labourer from a neighbouring country lawfully obtains an Aadhaar Card solely to access subsidised rations or welfare schemes, should that automatically confer upon him the sacred democratic right to vote in Indian elections? The unequivocal answer from the court was no, emphasising that Aadhaar remains a statutory identity instrument limited to benefit delivery and cannot override constitutional safeguards on franchise.
The judges also firmly rebuffed submissions portraying the Election Commission as a passive “post office” obliged to rubber-stamp every Form 6 application without verification, instead reaffirming the poll body’s plenary and inherent powers to scrutinise claims, detect discrepancies, and ensure that only genuine citizens appear on the electoral rolls—an authority the court said is indispensable for preserving the purity of democracy.
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Representing petitioners, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal mounted a vigorous defence, contending that the scale and stringency of the ongoing SIR exercise effectively disenfranchises millions of legitimate voters—particularly marginalised and documentation-poor citizens—by imposing onerous bureaucratic hurdles and triggering mass deletions, thereby inflicting an unconstitutional injury on the foundational democratic principle of universal adult suffrage.
While acknowledging that no citizen can be struck off the rolls without due notice and opportunity to be heard, the bench imposed strict deadlines for state-specific litigation: the Election Commission must file its counter in Tamil Nadu matters by December 1 ahead of a December 4 hearing; Kerala challenges will be taken up on December 2; and the sensitive West Bengal cases—marred by reports of booth-level officers dying by suicide under alleged work pressure—have been posted for December 9, with all parties directed to complete pleadings within the coming week.
