Hyderabad, Oct 4 — Supreme Court judge Justice Ujjal Bhuyan on Sunday strongly criticised any process that leads to the wholesale exclusion of citizens from electoral rolls, terming it intrinsically arbitrary and a direct assault on the Constitution.
Speaking at the valedictory address of the 19th Justice Bodh Raj Sawhney Memorial Moot Court Competition at NALSAR University of Law, Justice Bhuyan said, “If any process results in disenfranchising millions and millions of Indian citizens, making them second-class citizens in their own country in the sense of being citizens without voting rights, such a process is intrinsically arbitrary. No amount of whataboutery can justify it.”
He asserted that the Indian Constitution does not envisage two classes of citizens—one with voting rights and another without. Any such process, he emphasised, would violate Articles 326 (universal adult suffrage) and 14 (right to equality). “No authority can do it; no court can condone it. No one is above the Constitution,” Justice Bhuyan declared.
He underlined that the right to vote is intertwined with India’s long struggle for freedom and forms part of the basic structure of the Constitution. Article 326, he said, cannot be tinkered with at all. Justice Bhuyan further observed that except in the case of a deceased voter, no name can be deleted from the electoral rolls without notice and a hearing.
Detaching the right to vote from citizenship, he remarked, would be “like taking out the soul from the body.”
The remarks come amid ongoing controversies surrounding large-scale deletions under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and related petitions before the Supreme Court.
Justice Bhuyan’s statements reinforce the constitutional protection of adult suffrage as a non-negotiable foundation of Indian democracy.