The Kerala High Court on Friday refused to defer the revision of voter rolls in the state and asked the Left Democratic Front government to approach the Supreme Court, Bar and Bench reported.
A single-judge bench of Justice VG Arun was hearing a petition by the state government seeking to defer the process until December 21 to allow panchayat elections to be completed, Live Law reported.
Local body polls in the state are due to be held in two phases on December 9 and December 11, with votes scheduled to be counted on December 13. The last date for completion of the election is December 18.
According to the state’s petition, the elections would require about 1.7 lakh government personnel apart from 68,000 security staff. The voter roll revision exercise would demand an additional 25,668 personnel, Bar and Bench quoted the petition as saying.
“The pool of trained and election-experienced staff is finite, which constrains real-world deployment,” stated the plea. “Parting with such number of officers for simultaneous SIR and LSGI [local self-government institution] elections is a near impossibility, apart from possibly putting the state to an administrative impasse.”
This came days after the Election Commission began the enumeration phase of the exercise in 12 states and Union Territories, including Kerala, on November 4.
The exercise had been announced by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on October 27.
Besides Kerala, the states and Union Territories include Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry, where Assembly elections are expected to take place in 2026.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to respond within two weeks on petitions filed against the exercise in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
The top court had also directed the High Courts to keep in abeyance the petitions filed in relation to the exercise in the two petitioner states and also in Bihar.
On Friday, the High Court said that as petitions against the exercise are pending before the Supreme Court, “judicial discipline demands the High Court to refrain from hearing the matter”, reported Live Law.
Appearing for Kerala, Advocate General Gopalakrishna Kurup told the court that the state was not against the exercise but only sought to postpone it.
However, Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the Election Commission, said the revision of electoral rolls had been scheduled ahead of Assembly elections that are due in the state in 2026.
On November 5, the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala had said that it would move the Supreme Court against the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.
The decision came after an all-party meeting convened by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan in Thiruvananthapuram. All parties, except the Bharatiya Janata Party, that attended the meeting backed the state government’s decision to legally challenge the exercise.
The draft electoral rolls for the 12 states and Union Territories will be published on December 9. Voters can file claims and objections from December 9 to January 8, while hearings and verifications will take place from December 9 to January 31. The final electoral rolls are to be published on February 7.
In September, the Kerala Assembly unanimously passed a resolution against the Election Commission’s decision to conduct the revision, saying that the “hasty” move could harm the rights of citizens.
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