PANAJI
Six members of a St Cruz family who found themselves excluded from the electoral roll despite applying to update their residential addresses have won relief from the High Court of Bombay at Goa, which on Thursday quashed the rejection of their Form 8 applications.
The Court has directed the Chief Electoral Officer to restore their names within 10 days while also refusing to suspend its order to allow the Election Commission of India (ECI) to challenge the ruling before the Supreme Court.
After a marathon hearing over the past few days, the Division Bench of Justice Valmiki Menezes and Justice Amit Jamsandekar allowed the writ petition filed by Paresh Salgaonkar and five members of his family, setting aside the decisions of the North Goa District Election Officer and the CEO, Goa, which had rejected their applications.
“We allow the petition… We have rejected the contention of the ECI that the hearing in the present plea be deferred as the issue of SIR is pending before the SC. This is not pertaining to SIR… We therefore order the BLO of St Cruz Constituency to add the names of the petitioners within a period of 10 days from today,” the Bench said as it pronounced the operative part of the order.
The Court issued a mandamus directing the electoral officials to include the six names after confirming their residence. When ECI counsel Gaurish Agni sought a two-week stay to facilitate a challenge before the SC, the Bench refused, observing, “No stay. How can we grant a stay on including names of voters in the list? You get a stay from the SC.”
The family had moved the High Court after their names failed to appear in the draft electoral roll despite submitting Form 8 applications to update their residential addresses. The electoral authorities rejected the applications, and the appellate authorities subsequently upheld those decisions, prompting the family to challenge both sets of orders.
During the hearings, the ECI had urged the High Court to defer the proceedings, relying on a SC direction asking High Courts to keep writ petitions challenging the SIR process in abeyance. It argued that this petition also questioned the broader revision exercise. The ECI even took on board senior Supreme Court advocate Ashutosh Kumbhakoni to argue the matter before the Division Bench.
The Bench, however, distinguished the case from the wider SIR challenges pending before the SC, stating that Goa had already completed its revision exercise and the appellate orders challenged by the family flowed from the initial rejection of their applications.
On the merits, Kumbhakoni argued that the absence of names from the draft SIR roll amounted to non-inclusion rather than deletion. He submitted that the electoral rolls were being prepared afresh, based on newly collected enumeration forms, without automatically carrying forward entries from the previous rolls.
He contended that voters who had not submitted enumeration forms could not use Form 8 to update their addresses because they no longer had an active entry in the draft roll. Such voters, he said, had to apply afresh through Form 6 during the claims and objections period.
The Bench had questioned this position, particularly the requirement that voters who had shifted residence submit pre-filled enumeration forms carrying a declaration that they continued to reside at their previous addresses.
The Bench also highlighted the “catch-22” faced by relocated voters whose Form 8 applications for address changes are rejected, leaving them with no option but to apply through Form 6, which requires them to declare that they are not registered as voters elsewhere.
