NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Friday reprimanded the West Bengal government for sporadically rushing to court on “vague and irrelevant” reasons to delay the completion of particularly intensive revisions of the state electoral roll to hasten election results. SC Judicial officials from Jharkhand and Odisha have been deployed.“Please do not come to the court with vague reasons and try to delay the proceedings. There cannot be irrelevant reasons every day. It must end. We have exceeded our terms of reference (by using exclusive powers under Article 142 to direct the deployment of judicial officers for tasks that essentially fall within the domain of the EC). You are filing unnecessary complaints,” CJI Surya Kant said.
After these remarks Kapil Sibal Making serious accusations to the CJI and Justice Joymalya Bagchi: “Something strange has happened. EC officials are training judicial officers deployed by the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court on how documents submitted by the officers claiming the electorate will be accepted. “Sibal said this was in violation of the Supreme Court’s directive that the modalities would be decided by the Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court. However, for some reason, the judges do not like the Bangladesh government raising issues related to SIR from time to time.“When we say that the Chief Justice will decide the manner, we mean that he will decide which judicial officer will be deployed where and what facilities will be provided to him. The judicial officer alone will decide the validity of pending claims and documents submitted by voters,” the bench said, disagreeing with Sibal’s allegation that the Election Commission was ignoring the Supreme Court. Judge Bagchi said: “If European Commission officials do not provide training to judicial officials, who will. Our orders are clear. We give judicial officers the external responsibility to expedite SIRs. Both the state government and the Election Commission must provide and create a pleasant atmosphere for their work. “Finding the state on the receiving end, Sibal said, “The state chief secretary is here and unfortunately her voting rights are being questioned by the EC”. “Please ask your chief secretary to cooperate with the EC and judicial officers to complete the SIR at the earliest,” the bench said.Turning to another front, Sibal said the Election Commission must publish the supplementary voters’ list after the release of the final voters’ list on February 28 as judicial officials decide to include the names of a group of voters in the voters’ list.The judge said the SIR will be carried out strictly in accordance with the court order, which also specifies which documents will be accepted to review the claim.
