Supreme Court to hear on July 10 pleas challenging SIR in Bihar
Almost 2.93 crore voters in Bihar must produce documents establishing the date and place of their own birth as well as of their parents in the case of those born after 1987, as an SIR of the State's electoral rolls began on June 28, 2025.
The petitions were mentioned for early hearing before a Bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi by a battery of lawyers, including senior advocates Kapil Sibal, A.M. Singhvi, Gopal Sankaranarayanan and Shadan Farasat.
The petitioners included RJD MP Manoj Jha, TMC MP Mahua Moitra, Association for Democratic Reforms activist Yogendra Yadav, among others.
The court asked the petitioners to supply the Union government, the Election Commission of India (ECI) and other respondents arraigned with the copies of their petitions in advance.
The court also mentioned serving copies of the petitions to the Attorney General of India.
Mr. Singhvi said the SIR notification of June 24 imposes stringent deadlines on crores of poor and marginalised voters in Bihar to produce documents, not including Aadhaar and ration card, to prove their domicility.
Mr. Sibal said the Bench must issue notice to the ECI and ensure that the poll body explain the hasty timeline to conduct the SIR of electoral rolls in poll-boind Bihar which ran the risk of disenfranchising crores of voters in the State.
The ECI said that it has decided to start the SIR exercise across the whole country, starting with Bihar, with schedules for this to be issued separately. The Opposition INDIA bloc recently said it was mulling exploring legal options to challenge the poll body's move. Opposition leaders have underlined that the EC has more or less confirmed that the revision could weed out 20% of the State's population, who migrate for work.
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