SC raps Bengal for rushing to court daily against SIR | India News
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday cited “vague and irrelevant” reasons for the West Bengal government to rush to court for delaying the completion of a special intensive revision of the state’s voter list, which has accelerated Sc Deployed judicial officers from Jharkhand and Odisha.“Please do not come to court with vague reasons and try to delay the process. There cannot be an irrelevant reason here and there every day. This should end. We have gone beyond our mandate (by directly deploying judicial officers to perform a task by using exclusive powers under Article 142).” Kant said.Later came the comments Kapil Sibal The CJI and Justice Jayamalya Bagchi raised serious allegations that “strange things have happened. EC officials are training judicial officers, who were deployed by the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, on how to receive documents submitted with voters’ demands.”Sibal said it identified as a violation of the SC directive that the procedures to be decided by the Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court. The bench, however, dislikes the repeated raising of SIR related issues by the Bengal government for one reason or the other.“When we said that the Chief Justice of the High Court will decide the outline, we meant where a judicial officer would be posted and what facilities would be given to him. The judicial officer alone would decide the validity of pending claims and documents submitted by voters,” the bench said, disagreeing with Sibal’s allegation of neglect of the EC SC. Justice Bagchi said, “If EC officials do not train judicial officers, who else will? Our orders are clear as daylight. We gave judicial officers an overseas assignment to expedite the SIR. Both the state government and the EC have to provide and create a conducive environment for them to work.”Finding the state at the receiving end, Sibal said “the chief secretary of the state is here because unfortunately his franchise is being questioned by the EC”. “Ask your Chief Secretary to work in concert with the EC and judicial officers to complete the SIR expeditiously,” the bench said.Sibal, on the other hand, said that the EC must release the supplementary voter list after the release of the final voter list on February 28, when a batch of voters’ names were decided by the judicial officers for inclusion in the voter list.The bench said the SIR will be conducted strictly in accordance with the court’s order, which also specifies which documents will be accepted to verify the claims.
