GOA CURRENT : GOA COURT WILL GIVE ‘GYANESH’ SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

The biggest judicial question yet asked of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has come from the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court. And it goes to the very purpose of SIR. Hearing the case of Paresh Salgaonkar and five members of his family, Justices Valmiki Menezes and Amit Jamsandekar confronted the Election Commission with a fundamental question: “If citizens are excluded, what will we do with your SIR?” The Salgaonkars were not new voters. Paresh Salgaonkar had been voting since 2003, while his family members were existing electors. They had merely shifted residence within the Santa Cruz Assembly constituency, from Part 29 to Part 25. They followed the prescribed route and applied through Form 8, which is specifically meant for existing electors shifting residence. But their existing electoral entries had disappeared during the SIR process. ERONET could therefore no longer process their Form 8 applications because the very records that were supposed to be shifted could not be found. The Election Commission’s effective solution was to push them towards Form 6 — the mechanism used for registration as a new voter. The High Court called this a “mistake on your side” and later described the predicament as a “complete Catch-22 situation.” But the case has now moved beyond Forms 6 and 8 or an ERONET problem. The Bench has questioned whether software can effectively determine the exercise of statutory electoral powers and what happens when genuine citizens are excluded through a process intended to protect the integrity of electoral rolls. That raises questions the Election Commission must answer. How many existing voters faced similar Form 8 problems? How many were pushed towards Form 6? How many simply disappeared from the electoral rolls without having the resources or knowledge to challenge their exclusion? And there is another question for Gyanesh Kumar: at what point do repeated errors of this nature stop being adequately explained as mistakes? The Salgaonkar case may involve six voters in Goa. But the question it has produced goes to the heart of SIR itself: If citizens are being excluded, what will we do with your SIR?