New Delhi, Nov. 27 -- The Supreme Court on Wednesday emphasised that weeding out dead voters from electoral rolls is essential to deny any undue advantage to political parties even as the Election Commission of India accused political parties and leaders for creating a "scare" against the special intensive revision (SIR) carried out in multiple states for this purpose. Hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the SIR conducted by ECI in Bihar and in states of Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala where the process is underway, a bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant and justice Joymalya Bagchi said that despite the allegation that crores of voters will be disenfranchised in Bihar, following the SIR exercise, about 366,000 voters who have not appealed against their deletion. "Political workers know very well who are the dead voters and those who are alive and have migrated," the bench said, adding, "It all depends on the political gradient depending on your power. The party which is stronger gets all the votes of dead voters. That is why dead voters need to be weeded out." Senior advocate Kapil Sibal who appeared for some of the petitioners challenging the BIhar SIR process said it was undisputed that ECI has power to conduct SIR but he objected to the manner in which this exercise is being conducted. "Any exercise of revising electoral rolls post-Independence must not be exclusionary or else it will be unconstitutional." As per the present practice, Sibal said that the officer of the ECI analysing the enumeration forms filled during SIR is deciding on whether a citizen is an Indian or foreigner, which can be determined only by a quasi-judicial tribunal such as Foreigners Tribunal. "Even if one is to be excluded from the rolls, a process must be followed that is reasonable and fair," Sibal said. The court pointed out that initially while entertaining the challenge to the Bihar SIR, the impression given to it has not come true. "Initially, it was projected in Bihar that crores of people will be excluded. We know because of our orders that did not happen. At the end, the voters who are dead and have migrated were not disputed. Ultimately over 3 lakh voters have got deleted. We even sent our para legal volunteers to reach out to the people who got excluded. But nobody came forward to say I have been excluded." Sibal said that to assume that there are no errors in the process just because nobody came forward is not correct as there still exists remote corners in every state where the womenfolk and citizenry are illiterate and will not bother to file an appeal if they discover on the polling day that their names are excluded from the electoral rolls....