KMM reignites unity efforts, seeks meeting with SKM on Aug 26
In a letter to the SKM, the KMM has sought a meeting on Aug 26 to advance the unity efforts and jointly deal with the issues confronting the farming sector, including the legal guarantee on the minimum support price (MSP) and the land pooling policy of the state govt.
Earlier, the KMM, then aligned with the SKM (Non-Political), had held unity talks with the SKM, but these remained inconclusive due to a lack of sincerity and complete faith in each other.
Certain conditions set for unity were not met and no fruitful outcome was achieved.
KMM leaders Sarvan Singh Pandher and Manjit Singh Rai said: "Both central and state govts are coming out with the anti-farmer and anti-people policies focused on providing benefits to corporates. Such onslaught cannot be resisted by fighting independently. We need a collective fight to stop the govts from taking anti-farmer and anti-people decisions.
For this, we need to join hands. We have thus resumed the unity efforts and called the SKM for a meeting.
"
Though we fought a 13-month-long protest for the MSP at Shambhu and Khanauri borders along with the SKM (Non-Political), both forums continue to function independently. After the SKM, we will approach the SKM (Non-Political), Rai added.
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On July 16, the ECI published a list of voters who had not submitted their enumeration forms for the intensive revision. The ECI organised this data Assembly constituency-wise. This list contained 1.49 crore entries – names of voters, their fathers or husbands, and their EPIC numbers, among other details. On August 1, the ECI published the draft voter list which contained 7.24 crore names. The data was uploaded on a dedicated website called ' Bihar SIR Draft Roll 2025 ' and was also organised Assembly constituency-wise. Since both these lists were initially digital and machine-readable, we used a computer programme to extract names from both lists and compared their EPIC numbers. Voters whose details appeared in both were those who submitted their enumeration forms between July 16 and July 26. But the EPICs that appeared in the July 16 list and not in the August 1 list are those excluded in the draft voter list. The computer programme generated the details of 64,85,945 voters — a few thousand short of the ECI's official figure of 65 lakh excluded voters. For the second step, we used another programme to determine the religious identity of the excluded voters. This programme, called It's All in the Name, was published in Harvard Dataverse, a data repository hosted by Harvard University, in February 2023. The programme uses the name of a South Asian person and their parent to infer if they are non-Muslim or Muslim by giving them a 'Muslim score'. It gives a Muslim name a score of more than 0. Non-Muslim names get a score of less than 0. Among Muslim names, an ambiguous name gets a lower score and a clearly Muslim name a higher score. So, a voter named 'Navisa' in Forbesganj got a score of 0.1. But another called 'Md Irfan Alam' scored 1.5. We fed the programme the names of the excluded voters and the names of their fathers or husbands. For better accuracy, we set the 'Muslim score' at the conservative level of 0.3 to arrive at a more precise religious identity for every voter. In Seemanchal region, since the Muslim population is high, the score had to be adjusted to 0 to get more accurate results. Of the 64.9 lakh excluded voters, the programme classified 10.6 lakh as Muslim and 54.3 lakh as non-Muslim. Since Hindus form 99.48% of Bihar's non-Muslim population, we will use the terms interchangeably in this story. Findings Our analysis shows that the intensive revision has had an outsized impact on Hindu voters in Bihar. In 20 of Bihar's 38 districts, Hindus have been excluded from the draft voter list over and above their share of population from the 2011 census. This exclusion is most acute in the Seemanchal region, where the population of Muslims is between 38% and 68%. For example, 57% of Araria district is Hindu. But the community forms 65.4% of voters excluded in the district's draft voter list, a difference of 8.34%. Muslims are disproportionately excluded in the remaining 18 districts, but the proportions are considerably smaller than Hindus. For instance, 6.7% of Jehanabad district is Muslim. But 8.5% of those excluded in the district are Muslim – that is 4,315 voters. In Gopalganj district, which has highest exclusion in Bihar in percentage terms, Hindus have been disproportionately excluded at 1.72%. In Patna, which has the highest exclusion in absolute numbers, Muslims have been disproportionately excluded at 0.2%. Assemblies To further analyse the exclusion of Hindus in Seemanchal, we compared the population of Hindus and Muslims with their exclusion rate in 12 of the 24 Assembly constituencies of the region. These are Forbesganj and Araria in Araria district, Amour, Baisi and Purnia in Purnia district, and Korha, Katihar, Kadwa, Balrampur, Pranpur, Manihari and Barari in Katihar district. We selected these Assembly constituencies because they perfectly overlap with one or more blocks or nagar panchayats, for which the 2011 census provides a religious breakup of population. The other 12 Assemblies that we could not analyse are made up of blocks as well as gram panchayats. The last census does not give data on religious groups in gram panchayats. We found that the exclusion trends in Assembly constituencies are the same as those at the district-level. Hindus are disproportionately excluded in each of the 12 seats. A closer look at the exclusion rate of Hindus in these constituencies shows that it is higher in seats that were won by the Opposition parties in the 2020 Assembly elections. In seats with Bharatiya Janata Party MLAs, only in Korha constituency in Katihar was the disproportionate exclusion of Hindus close to 10%.
