PoliticsCourts
Supreme Court petition seeks panel led by former Chief Justice to review Election Commission
Advocate Vishal Tiwari's PIL also asks the court to order an 'absolute prohibition' on religious appeals in election campaigns, with complaints decided within 48 hours.
Key points
- The PIL asks for an expert committee chaired by a former CJI or Supreme Court judge to report within six months.
- It cites about 38.20 lakh appeals filed in West Bengal's SIR, of which about 1.02 lakh have been decided.
- It seeks automatic FIRs and disqualification proceedings against candidates who make religion-based appeals.
A public interest petition in the Supreme Court has asked for an independent expert committee, chaired by a former Chief Justice of India or a former Supreme Court judge, to examine how the Election Commission works and recommend reforms.
The petition, filed by advocate Vishal Tiwari against the Union government and the Commission, also asks the court to direct the Commission to enforce an “absolute prohibition” on campaigning that uses religious tags, symbols, communal appeals, sectarian identity or hate speech.
Tiwari wants the committee to include experts in constitutional law, election administration, statistics, technology, cybersecurity and data protection, and to report within six months. It would look at the Commission’s strength and workload, how it takes decisions and records dissent, the revision of electoral rolls, the capacity to hear appeals, and how reliable its digital systems are.
What the petition cites
The plea points to reports that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi recorded objections on at least 14 occasions over ten months, which the Commission called “routine suggestions”. It says about 38.20 lakh appeals were filed by people left out of the rolls in West Bengal’s special intensive revision, and only about 1.02 lakh have been disposed of. It also cites 2,70,313 electors in Maharashtra’s draft roll shown as aged between 101 and 150 because of a default birth year.
The petition is careful about what it claims. “A backlog of appeals is not by itself proof that each deletion was unlawful,” it says, adding that it “does not seek a finding against any political party or individual office-holder.” Its argument is that “institutional independence is not secured by constitutional status alone.”
On religious campaigning, it asks that complaints be decided within 48 hours, and that FIRs and disqualification proceedings follow automatically against candidates who appeal for votes on religious grounds.
No date has been set for a hearing.