West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee did not appear in person on Monday in the Supreme Court hearing challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) petitions in West Bengal. The please were filed by the TMC supremo and her party MPs Derek Orien and Dola Sen.
The matter was taken up by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice Vipul M Pancholi. The court said it will issue orders and clarifications but there will be no impediments in SIR in any of the states.
The court directed more than 8,000 officers whose names have been handed over on Monday to be present in front of respective District Electoral Officers (DEO) by 5 pm on Tuesday.
The counsel appearing for the state said they will make 8,505 Group B officers available to oversee SIR related process. The counsel for Election Commission (EC) said the polling body has not yet received the list of officers. The state's counsel said that they were awaiting a response from the EC.
The move comes less than a week after the counsel appearing for EC told the court that the West Bengal government had made only 80 Grade 2 officers available to oversee the SIR process. This was also the day when Mamata scripted history by being the first CM to argue her case in the apex court and had questioned why 8,300 micro observers were coming from outside the state. The CM had questioned why District Electoral Officers (DEO) and other officers from the state were not overseeing the SIR process. The counsel appearing for the state said on Monday there are 294 Electoral Registration Officers (ERO) who are Group B officers.
EC argued that they had written five letters to the state government on Group 2 officers but received no response.
What else did the Supreme Court say?
The court also said the discretion to replace the existing Electoral Registration Officers (ERO), Assistant Electoral Registration Officers (AERO) lies with ECI and that services of present officers should be utilised if found qualified.
The other issues argued in the court include logical discrepancies (LD) in names leading to lakhs of people being called for SIR hearings and creating chaos among people. The court said minor LDs in names cannot amount to people being left out of the SIR list.
The biodata of these state government officials will be briefly scrutinised after which they may be imparted a brief training of a day or two so as to work as the micro observers. The right to remove names from the final SIR list does not lie with the micro observers the court said. The responsibility assigned to micro observers or the state govt officials shall be to only assist the EROs and the final decision to include or exclude names will lie with the ERO.
The court also granted an additional one week beyond the February 14 deadline for scrutiny of names by EROs as a new set of government officials have been inducted. The petitioners suggested that the process of scrutinising documents submitted by affected persons is likely to take more time, which was considered by the apex court.
The court said the state police should ensure maintenance of law and order and directed the West Bengal Director General of Police (DGP) to file a personal affidavit on the allegations against the state.
