Faulty SIR in Bihar is like exposing voter list, democracy to termites: Kapil Sibal

New Delhi, Aug 21 (IANS) Former Law Minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday trained his guns on the Election Commission of India (ECI) alleging irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar and stated that lapses in the preparation of the voter list is a threat to democracy.

“The way the voter list is being prepared in Bihar, the way names of lakhs of electors are being deleted, the way no addition is being allowed, the way Block Level Officers (BLOs) are functioning and the way enumeration forms are being filled and uploaded without any documents at the behest of BDOs, it all amounts to exposing the voter list to termites,” he said.

“After all, voter list is the foundation of democracy. How will the election be conducted if the voter list is eaten into by termites,” Kapil Sibal said.

Hitting out at the introduction of the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirtieth Amendment) Bill, 2025 by Union Home Minister Amit Shah that is aimed to check tainted heads of government from running their administrations from jail, he claimed that the government will never be able to get the Bill passed as it does not have two-thirds majority.

The Constitution law expert doubted the intentions of the NDA government at the Centre behind introducing the Bill.

“You know how the system works. Soon after an FIR is registered a person is arrested by the CBI or if it does not arrest, then the ED does so. It takes months, years to get bail and Arvind Kejriwal, Satyendar Jain, Manish Sisodia and Hemant Soren are examples of this,” he said.

“There is no way that this Constitutional amendment is going to be passed as the NDA government lacks majority. They have 293 votes while the amendment Bill requires 363 MPs,” he said.

Sibal said that "since 2014 we have seen the introduction of such Bills that are targeted at stripping people of their rights guaranteed by the Constitution."

"These are laws that have the potential to harm the Constitution like termites and render a functional structure hollow,” he said, alleging that the Union government wants to destroy democracy.

--IANS

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