India, June 3 -- In the wake of the Supreme Court's verdict last week upholding the constitutional validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), senior advocate Prashant Bhushan described the ruling as a "blot" on the Court, comparable to ADM Jabalpur during the Emergency. The remark was echoed by political activist and petitioner in Challenge to the ECI's Revision of Electoral Rolls in Bihar, Yogendra Yadav, and reproduced in subsequent media commentary.

The comparison is deliberately provocative. While voter-list revision is not equivalent to the suspension of civil liberties, the analogy captures the frustration caused by rights becoming meaningless when courts do not intervene in time.

To understand the distress that followed th...