The vote is not a favour: Supreme Court judge Bhuyan warns the SIR is shrinking who counts as a voter

A serving Supreme Court judge has said what the Election Commission has never quite managed to say aloud. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, speaking at NALSAR on Sunday, said the right to vote — the right to be a voter — is not a mere statutory right that flows from parliamentary legislation like the Representation of the People Act, 1951, but a constitutional right forming a distinct part of democracy itself, positioned within the basic structure of the Constitution. 'From the persona of an Indian citizen, the right to vote or right to be included in the voters list cannot be detached,' he said. 'It will be like taking out the soul from the body.' 'If any process results in disenfranchising millions and millions of Indian citizens, making them second class citizens in their own country... such a process is intrinsically arbitrary,' Bhuyan warned. 'No amount of whataboutery can justify it. It strikes at the very heart of the Constitution.' The Constitution, he noted, 'does not provide for two classes of citizens: citizens with voting rights and citizens without voting rights' — and any process leading to wholesale disenfranchisement would violate Articles 326 (universal adult franchise) and 14 (equality). Except in the case of a dead voter, he added, a name once enlisted in the roll cannot be deleted without notice and hearing. The warning could not be better timed. In Karnataka, the chief electoral officer has ordered criminal action over bulk Form 7 deletion applications filed with faked death certificates. In Babaleshwar alone, 1,373 deletion requests arrived in a single day — 1,363 from just 10 people, overwhelmingly targeting Muslim voters. In Bhalki, more than 1,700 names were filed by about 30 people; in Ballari, 13,000 applications were submitted and withdrawn. Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar has alleged 45 lakh such applications statewide, calling it a conspiracy against minorities, Dalits and tribals. In West Bengal, the Supreme Court ruled that voters whose appeals against exclusion succeed must be allowed to vote — even as 34 lakh appeals sit pending before 19 tribunals, a backlog the court called a 'herculean task'. And the Commission's own machinery tells its own story: The Hindu reports new ERONET options letting officers dispose of SIR notice cases without documents or hearings — introduced midway through the third phase, demonstrated by video, with no written instructions yet, and unavailable in the 22 states where the exercise is complete. A process deciding who votes, changed mid-stream, by demo video. The INDIA bloc has made the SIR a national protest issue. Bhuyan's formulation cuts through the politics: an administrative drive that treats every voter as a suspect until proven otherwise stands the republic on its head. The burden of proof was never meant to fall on the citizen.