The Supreme Court recently refused to entertain a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking the declaration of voting rights as part of fundamental rights.

Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud stressed the necessity for a live controversy to be present before the top court, adding that the need for a legal dispute to warrant jurisdiction under Article 32.

Though the counsel claimed of an imminent threat to voting rights in India. The Chief Justice remarked that they did not find evidence of any such live issue that would justify the court’s intervention under Article 32.

Furthermore, it was observed that the apex court did not find the existence of any such live issue which warrants the jurisdiction under Article 32. Therefore, the Supreme Court proceeded to dismiss the plea without expressing its merits.

The advocate appearing for the petitioner pointed out examples from countries like the USA and the UK, where rogue organizations posed threats to democracy in the past. However, seemingly disinclined to entertain the matter further, the bench dismissed the plea without expressing any opinion on its merits.

Last year, a bench of Justice S Ravindra Bhat and Justice Aravind Kumar while dealing with an election petition case underlined that the importance of the right to vote and a constitutional provision enabling every eligible citizen to exercise common suffrage. 

During the hearing in the aforesaid matter, the top court has called it paradoxical that the right to vote is not assigned the status of a fundamental right while democracy has been recognised as a basic feature of the Indian Constitution.

The bench said that democracy has been held to be a part of one of the essential features of the Constitution. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, the right to vote has not been recognised as a fundamental right; it was termed as a mere statutory right, the bench added.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Delimitation Act, 2002 were not applicable to the Scheduled Area in absence of the notification issued by the Governor of the State under Clause 5(1) of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution of India.

The Bench of Justice A.S. Oka and Justice Rajesh Bindal last week rejected a writ petition filed by Adivasis for Social and Human Rights Action, noting that there was absolutely ‘no merit’ in the appeal and that the High Court was right in rejecting the petition. 

The Bench, however, refrained from imposing cost noting that the appellant was a society working for the welfare of indigenous people.

It said under sub­ clause (e) of Clause (1) of Article 19 of the Constitution, every citizen had a right to reside and settle in any part of India. However by making a law, reasonable restrictions can be put on the said Fundamental Right as provided in Clause (5) of Article 19. 

The Apex Court further dismissed the argument that the fifth schedule of the Constitution took away the right of a non-tribal person to settle down and vote in a scheduled area.

It said the argument that the Fifth Schedule was a law made by Parliament was misconceived. Even assuming that the Fifth Schedule was a law, it did not put any constraints on the exercise of Fundamental Rights under Article 19(1) of the Constitution of India, added the Bench.

As per the Apex Court, the right to vote was governed by Part III of the 1950 Act. Every eligible voter was entitled to be registered in the electoral roll of a constituency, in which he was ordinarily residing. Any person eligible to vote who was ordinarily residing in the Scheduled Area, had a right to vote, even if he was a non-­Tribal, it observed.

The petition had challenged the Odisha High Court order on the grounds that in a Scheduled Area, no one other than the members of the Scheduled Tribes have the right to settle down. 

This was particularly with respect to the district of Sundargarh in Orissa, which was declared a Scheduled Area on December 31, 1977 by the President of India, in exercise of power under Clause 6(2) of the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution.

It was also argued in the writ petition that those who were not members of the Scheduled Tribes, but still residing in the Scheduled Area, were unlawful occupants and dis-entitled to exercise their right to vote in any constituency in the Scheduled Area. 

The petition sought a declaration that every constituency in the Scheduled Area is a reserved constituency under Articles 330 and 332 of the Constitution of India. It was also contended that no candidate, other than the candidates belonging to the Scheduled Tribes, should have the right to contest the elections of the Legislative Assembly or the Lok Sabha in the Scheduled Area. 

Another contention raised in the petition was that the Representation of the People Act, 1950 and the Delimitation Act, 2002 are not applicable to the Scheduled Area in absence of the notification issued by the Governor of the State under Clause 5(1) of the Fifth Schedule. The High Court dismissed the writ petition.

(Case title: Adivasis for Social and Human Rights Action vs Union of India and Ors)

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday issued notice on a Petition of the Bombay Judo Association  seeking restoration of voting rights. 

The Association has filed a plea through Advocate Abhishek Gupta. 
According to the petition the Association was formed in the year 1962 and is the governing body of sports of Judo in Mumbai.

It is submitted by the Petitioner that the association does not have voting rights despite an order of April 9, 2018 passed by the Delhi High Court in the matter of Yashpal Solanki vs Union of India and others.

The petition also stated that in the year 2018 based on the directives dated February 23, 2017, issued by the Ministry of Youth Affairs and sports , Judo Federation of India(JFI) suo moto withdrew the two voting rights conferred on the Association.

The upcoming elections of the Judo Federation will take place on 5 March 2022,however the petitioner is arbitrarily and willfully deprived of its voting rights in non-compliance with this court order of April 9, 2018.

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While considering the petition , Justice V Kameswar Rao issued notice to the Centre and Judo Federation of India (JFI).

Advocate Nina R Nariman is the  counsel for the petitioner Bombay Judo Association whereas Anil Soni is the Standing Counsel for the Central Government.

The Court has listed the matter for further hearing on March 11, 2022.

By Kenneth Tiven in Washington

“From the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the filibuster has blocked popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes, and fight workplace discrimination… Now it is being used to block voting rights.” That was Dr Martin Luther King in one of his speeches during the civil rights movement he spearheaded. The march last week was to reinforce his views on voting rights and his family didn’t sugar coat their feelings, declaring: “The weaponization of the filibuster is racism cloaked in procedure and it must go.” Voting rights bills need a 60% super majority in a US Senate split 50:50 because of the filibuster rule. The 10 to 12 Republican votes needed are not going to be forthcoming. For one thing, the bill would roadblock measures that Republican controlled state legislatures hope will reduce Democratic voters.

Republicans have made it quite clear that the voting fraud they claim but can’t find or prove will not keep Republicans from winning political office. Among a raft of legislations to discourage citizens, they have made it harder for voters in several states to get an absentee ballot. On technicalities, Texas this past week refused half the 900 applicants wanting an absentee ballot for a March local election.

In Arizona, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, the office that most states make responsible for elections, finds a Trump endorsed Mark Finchem seeking the job. He went to Washington on January 6, 2021, to protest the election, and he maintains that the vote in Arizona was stolen. Finchem is a QAnon conspiracy theorist who campaigns, saying, “a whole lot of elected officials participate in a pedophile network in the distribution of children.” Less absurd but equally devout Trump supporters are running for secretary of state in Georgia and other closely contested states.

Imagine a QAnon conspiracy theorist whose mission is making sure Donald Trump gets elected overseeing an election. Trump can! Finchem said: “We have to be a lot sharper the next time when it comes to counting the vote.” In a video, he said: “Sometimes the vote counter is more important than the candidate.… They have to get tougher and smarter.” When Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said on national television that, “The election was fair, as fair as we have seen. We simply did not win the election, as Republicans, for the presidency…”, the former president went ballistic, saying, “Is he crazy or just stupid? The numbers are conclusive, and the fraudulent and irregular votes are massive.”

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The Biden administration is getting little if any support from Congressional Republicans or from the Supreme Court for that matter, where the Trump appointees do not look favourably on his presidential power. By a 5 to 3 vote, the Court struct down a presidential order that required businesses with 100 or more employees to require staff to be vaccinated, or test weekly and wear a mask at work. Employees working at home or mostly outside or with a religious exemption were not subject to this. The six justice Republican majority ruled that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) did not have the authority to require vaccinations or masks and testing because the coronavirus is not specific to the workplace. Their conclusion: OSHA’s responsibility is only to make sure that conditions related to the workplace are safe.

Incredulous is the best characterisation of the dissent from Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. “COVID-19 poses grave dangers to the citizens of this country—and particularly, to its workers,” they wrote.

“The disease has by now killed almost 1 million Americans…. It spreads by person-to-person contact in confined indoor spaces, so causes harm in nearly all workplace environments. And in those environments, more than any others, individuals have little control, and therefore little capacity to mitigate risk…. So the administrative agency charged with ensuring health and safety in workplaces did what Congress commanded it to do: It took action to address COVID-19’s continuing threat in those spaces.”

The Supreme Court liberals did manage a majority joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh to decline to block the vaccination mandate for healthcare workers. In this case, the federal government has the right to mandate that institutions with federally insured Medicare and Medicaid patients can require their employees to not willfully spread a deadly virus to their patients.

Also Read:–Martin Luther King and Voting Rights

Why are Republicans and their allies so intent on not caring that 850,000+ people are dead in the US from the Covid-19 variants? You might also wonder why people have died believing conspiracy theories about vaccines when they all have had multiple vaccinations growing up as required by law. It suggests the power of ideological propaganda versus scientific fact. These are not the first politicians to use such tactics even if it kills more of their own voters than on the other side.

A theory is that it keeps people angry about the Biden administration and eager to vote in November and again in 2024 when Trump expects he can get nominated for run for another term. If he won, he’d be the second president to split his two terms with a presidential loss. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat served as the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, getting two numbers because he served non-consecutive terms from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to 1897. Franklin Roosevelt was elected to four terms but only gets one number—32, because they were consecutive.

The Ohio Supreme Court got into the voting arena recently telling the state legislature that its maps for Congressional districts and for state legislative districts unfairly favoured the Republicans who had drawn it. This literally sends the Republican majority back to the drawing board. It was a narrow 4-3 decision finding the maps violated a voter-approved measure in 2018 that handed the power to draw political boundary lines to a commission, in hopes of stemming the practice of gerrymandering. One might ask why Republican legislators ignored the 2018 measure in the first place if it was the will of the Ohio voters.

—The writer has worked in senior positions at The Washington Post, NBC, ABC and CNN and also consults for several Indian channels

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