Kolkata: An MBBS aspirant whose mother’s name was deleted from the electoral roll during the SIR and two men working in West Asia who were also disenfranchised during the revision have moved Calcutta High Court seeking directions for the issuance and renewal of their passports.Justice Krishna Rao on Thursday requested the SIR Appellate Tribunal to dispose of their appeals within two weeks.Abdul Alim Sekh (41) from Beldanga in Murshidabad, has been working in Kuwait since Aug 15, 2016. He has a work visa and an employment contract. As an overseas employee, Abdul must possess an active passport. His passport has lapsed and he has to get it renewed through the Indian embassy in Kuwait if he wants to continue working there.But Abdul’s passport renewal application has been put on hold because his primary identity document — the electoral photo identity card — has been flagged as “deleted” in the public database.Abdul, the sole earning member of his family, was a registered voter in the Beldanga assembly constituency. He filed an appeal with the SIR Appellate Tribunal against the deletion on June 7.The petition filed by Abdul’s wife in the high court states that Election Commission had cited “impossible or illogical age difference between elector and his mother” as the reason for the deletion of his name from the voters’ list. Abdul’s date of birth, as mentioned in his school-leaving certificate, is July 12, 1986. His mother’s date of birth is shown as Dec 2, 1965.The age difference between the two is 20 years and eight months, more than the 15-year threshold set by EC for applicants in Bengal to avoid the “logical discrepancy” tag during the SIR.The petition by Abdul’s wife alleged that a typographical error in the digitised database had prompted the computer algorithm to flag the relationship between him and his mother as an anomaly, resulting in the deletion of his name.“If his voter status is not cleared immediately and his appeal is not decided, his employment visa will expire, resulting in job termination, breach of employment contract and will financially ruin his family,” the petition reads.Abdul’s counsel also presented the case of Md Ismail from Malda, who works in Saudi Arabia. The 32-year-old, who was a voter in the Madaha assembly constituency and has been working in West Asia since Aug 2016, needs to get his passport renewed. But the deletion of Ismail’s name from the voters’ list during the SIR has cast a cloud over the renewal of his passport, putting his future in jeopardy.“The petitioner has a legitimate expectation that the Appellate Tribunal, having been constituted specifically for rapid and specialised revision disputes, would hear and decide his statutory appeal within a responsible and swift timeline. The ongoing delay of over sixty days in adjudicating an appeal that is fully documented violates this expectation and amounts to administrative non-feasance,” reads the petition filed by Ismail’s brother.In yet another case, Bibi Kajali’s son, who has been selected for an MBBS course in Bangladesh, is allegedly being denied a passport because his mother’s name was deleted from the electoral roll during the SIR. Kajali, too, has filed an appeal with the SIR Appellate Tribunal.
