The court was hearing a batch of petitions from last year challenging the June 24 notification for SIR in Bihar.

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Election Commission of India whether it had thought of determining citizenship while issuing the order for conducting special intensive revision (SIR), pointing out that the poll panel had cited migration, urbanisation and updation of entries as the dominant reasons for the revision of electoral roll.

“When you started this exercise, was citizenship in your mind or are you second-guessing it as a reason to begin this exercise?” a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and justice Joymalya Bagchi asked the poll panel. The court was hearing a batch of petitions from last year challenging the June 24 notification for SIR in Bihar.

Senior advocates Rakesh Dwivedi and Maninder Singh, representing ECI, submitted that SIR exercise had not been undertaken since 2003 in Bihar and was conducted in response to changing demographic realities, including urbanisation and migration. For the past 20 years, summary revision of rolls was carried periodically that required voters to give a “self-declaration” of their citizenship without any intrusive scrutiny of their claim, Dwivedi argued.

“You say 20 years have lapsed and so much migration and urbanisation has taken place and so you invoke your power to have a SIR. But if you are defending SIR to examine illegal migration, it is not very eloquently put in your SIR notification,” the bench told ECI.

Dwivedi said the notification could have been better worded, admitting that it does mention migration as a reason for SIR. The court, however, remarked, “The word ‘migration’ ordinarily refers to lawful movement. Inter-state migration is a constitutional right. Your SIR order does not pin-point trans-border migration or illegal migration. If you are to defend SIR on the ground of inter-state migration or wrong entries, then the bigger right of determining citizenship does not come to the fore.”

Dwivedi referred to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2003, which, he pointed out, was enacted after the last SIR and introduced stricter requirements for establishing citizenship, including proof relating to parents’ citizenship.

“Did this amendment act as a trigger for the SIR order?” the bench asked, to which Dwivedi responded that the amendment had never been operationalised earlier and that the present SIR provided an appropriate opportunity to take note of the changed legal framework.

Dwivedi said that a roving and fishing enquiry into the special scrutiny cannot be done at the behest of a few NGOs, parliamentarians and politicians. “None of the 66 lakh (6.6 million) persons, whose names were deleted in Bihar SIR, came to this court or high court or filed pleas with the Election Commission. A roving and fishing enquiry cannot be permitted at the instance of ADR (Association for Democratic Reforms) and the PUCL (People’s Union for Civil Liberty) and a few parliamentarians,” Dwivedi said.

The bench complimented ECI, saying: “You definitely have a case as no appeal has been filed against the SIR in Bihar...All that we are trying to ascertain is what was there in the mind of the commission while seeking SIR.”

The court posted the matter for further hearing on January 28.