Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi

New Delhi: The Congress on Wednesday criticized the Supreme Court’s decision on SIR for not mentioning “major flaws and contradictions” in the Election Commission’s process, saying it has “denied crores of citizens the right to vote”. It said the judicial challenge by political parties and civil society pertains to lapses in the conduct of the Election Commission and not to the legal validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi said at a press conference that the SIR has raised serious questions on the credibility of the elections, as 80% of voter boycott challenges in West Bengal have been found successful so far. He said that if the success rate continues then lakhs of voters may be deprived of their franchise in the recent elections.Singhvi said the judgment is full of contradictions as it does not mention the glaring errors and lapses in the SIR process that have been observed in various states over the past few months. He said the Supreme Court had ruled that Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship and the Election Commission cannot rule on it, but lakhs of people were left out of the list on the issue of citizenship based on 7-8 documents sought by SIR such as ration card, date of birth of parents. Similarly, he said the Election Commission had set extremely short deadlines for SIRs for crores of people, leading to large-scale exclusion of people even before the elections were decided on them.He commented, “This is an issue which the court should have considered.”TMC MP Kalyan Banerjee said the SIR verdict was limited to the Bihar case and could not be treated as a pan-India verdict, adding that the issues raised in Bengal were “completely different”.