New Delhi: Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, Supreme Court judge, has come down harshly on the special intensive revision of voter rolls – a process overseen by the Election Commission resulting in the ouster of 13 crore names from the lists.Justice Bhuyan was delivering the valedictory address at the 19th NALSAR-Justice BR Sawhney Memorial Moot Court Competition at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. His words amount to the strongest reprimand of the process by a sitting apex court judge yet.Bar and Bench quotes Justice Bhuyan as having 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. It strikes at the very heart of the Constitution and I would go to the extent of saying that it is a negation of the constitutional order which we have adopted under the Constitution of India,” he said.Portions of his speech quoted by the outlet are powerful. Justice Bhuyan noted that the creation of the disenfranchised class is illegal.“Indian Constitution does not provide for two classes of citizens: citizens with voting rights and citizens without voting rights. Any process which leads to wholesale disenfranchisement of Indian citizens making them citizens without voting rights would be violative of Articles 326 and 14 of the Constitution of India.”He stressed that no one is above the constitution.“No authority can do it; no court can condone it. No one is above the Constitution.”Justice Bhuyan’s words echo what former Supreme Court judge Justice Rohinton Nariman said on September 27, also reported by Bar and Bench:“The common man today under our Constitution, and if I may say so, the heart of our Constitution, the heart of our democracy, which is the right to vote, is in great peril.”Both judges’ words are especially resonant because they come amidst a nationwide movement against the unilateral decisions of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar during the SIR exercise – often going against constitutional dictum and his fellow Election Commissioners who have formally objected 14 times in the last 10 months.The Wire has reported on how a vast number of deletions, most affecting Indian Muslim voters, were generated centrally by the Election Commission itself.Justice Nariman made no bones of the impact in Bengal in his speech.“So can you imagine, this was a completely illegal knocking out of the common man, of the citizen of India, in order that a government obtains what it wants. And the result of that you saw in West Bengal was something that upset the government of the day and brought in the government of the centre,” he said.Justice Bhuyan, today, also tackled the deletion of names from electoral rolls:“Except in the case of a dead voter, the name of a voter once enlisted in the electoral roll cannot be deleted without notice and hearing. From the persona of an Indian citizen, the right to vote or right to be included in the voters list cannot be detached. It will be like taking out the soul from the body.”Justice Bhuyan also noted that the Indian citizen’s right to cast their vote is “central to the basic structure doctrine itself.”For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.