The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Centre, the Election Commission and the Assam government over deletion of names from state’s voter list.
A bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi and Justice Sanjiv Khanna on Friday issued the notices while hearing the petition by social activist Gopal Seth, questioning the “deletion” of names — those excluded from the draft National Register for Citizens (NRC) — from the state’s voters’ list, Indian Express reported.
The plea referred to the case of one Susanta Sen, a resident of Sivasagar district in Assam. The petitioner’s counsel Pijush K Roy said Sen’s name had been deleted from the voters’ list as it did not appear in draft NRC published on July 30, 2018.
The petition said Sen’s name had appeared in the 2014 voters’ list but his name has now been deleted as it did not make it to the NRC though “name of other family members of the Petitioner have figured in the Draft NRC”.
Sen contended that “the right to vote in the democratic system is a constitutional right regulated by the statutory law and the freedom of a citizen to participate in the election process to choose their representative is a constitutional as well as statutory right, which cannot be taken away by any stretch of imagination.”
The petition added that “in the present case, a large number of population who are citizen of India by birth or any other process, who are ordinarily residents of Assam and were exercising their voting rights since they became adult….and it is because sudden deletion of their names from the draft NRC they are going to be deprived from their statutory rights