Is Election Commission's Bihar poll roll revision deadline impractical? Experts debate
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Daily Briefing: The great paper chase in Bihar; TCS layoffs; and more
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The Supreme Court will likely take up the clutch of petitions challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Bihar's electoral rolls today. Opposition parties and civil society groups have raised concerns over the potential disenfranchisement of existing electors. The first phase of the SIR ended on July 26, where 7.23 crore of the 7.89 crore electors submitted enumeration forms, within the deadline (July 25). The draft roll will be published on August 1, and in the subsequent month, electors will be required to submit documents to establish their eligibility. After the documents are verified, the final electoral roll will be published on September 30. As many as 65 lakh names of those who have passed away, migrated permanently, registered more than once, or are untraceable, will be removed from the existing rolls, the Election Commission has said. In the second phase, the EC said volunteers will be deployed to help electors obtain the documents to meet the September 1 submission deadline. However, this is no easy task. My colleague Santosh Singh, who spoke to a dozen Block Level Officers (BLOs) across the state, reports that many can still not file one of the 11 documents needed. The Opposition parties, meanwhile, have hit out at the SIR as a 'citizenship verification' drive — an exercise that remains outside the purview of the election watchdog. In other news from the poll-bound Bihar, LJP (RV) chief Chirag Paswan's fresh salvos at the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government for the 'deteriorating law and order' in the state have left the alliance in an uncomfortable position. The Opposition has latched onto the opportunity to portray that an NDA constituent's criticism shows Kumar was 'not in control' of the state administration. 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The Print
2 hours ago
- The Print
Bihar voter list revision is not anti-democratic—India can't let illegals influence polls
Before going into the question of whether or not the exercise is asking for too much documentation in too short a time in order to establish the legitimacy of voters on the list, we must deal with the two-faced politics of it first. The exercise is legitimate in itself, for it is the Election Commission's (EC) job to ensure that citizens eligible to vote are included in the voters' list, and those who are not Indian citizens are excluded. One can object to how quickly it is being done, but there is no case whatsoever to object to the SIR per se . West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has turned it into a Bengali vs non-Bengali issue. She knows that what happens in Bihar may sooner or later happen in Bengal too, which will have assembly elections next year. Banerjee is very dependent on a consolidated Muslim vote to get her Trinamool Congress over the finish line. Some NDA allies, including the Telugu Desam Party, without opposing the SIR exercise outright, have also expressed concerns about its goals. The Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar—due for assembly elections in a few months—has raised hackles mostly among Opposition politicians. They believe that it is a covert exercise to remove minority voters from the voters' list in order to benefit the BJP and the NDA. So, when the Telugu Desam Party says that the SIR exercise should not be a way to determine citizenship, it is right in a technical sense, but not quite. The EC cannot determine citizenship, but it has the right to know whether someone on the voters' list is a citizen or not. Opposition's mala fide intention The EC says that 99.8 per cent of electors have already been covered in the SIR (till 25 July), and just 1.2 lakh voters have not submitted their forms/documents. That's a very small percentage of missing forms. What may be of concern is the likely exclusion of nearly 64-65 lakh voters currently on the list, which is just under nine per cent of the total. But the EC's numbers do indicate why so many may be excluded unless they prove otherwise. Of the proposed deletions from the draft electoral roll, 22 lakh are deceased, 35 lakh are out-migrants who may have shifted permanently out of Bihar, and another 7 lakh had their names in multiple state voter lists. All the parties likely to contest in the state have been given the list of likely exclusions, and they have till 1 August to raise objections. Nothing sounds unfair, except for the tight deadlines. If the Opposition boycotts the polls over the SIR issue, it will be acting with mala fide intention. It cannot be anyone's case that people who live elsewhere must be on Bihar's voter list, or that the dead should be represented by fraudulent impostors voting in their names, or that people registered in multiple states should be allowed to vote in Bihar, too, unless those other states first delete their names. No political party will admit to it, but each one wants to see that its potential voters are not excluded. They may have no problems with the other exclusions and deletions. The Opposition parties, which rely heavily on the Muslim vote in Bihar and West Bengal, are not keen to see Bangladeshi citizens who may have gotten into our voters' lists excluded. The BJP in West Bengal, on the other hand, would not like to see the same citizenship scrutiny being imposed on Hindu Bangladeshis, though many of them may be living in West Bengal due to persecution in Bangladesh. Since all non-NDA Opposition parties seem united in demanding a cancellation of Bihar's SIR, it's safe to assume they fear their own vote bank stands to lose the most. Two arguments are being made against SIR: The exercise has given voters too little time, and it does not accept widely available documents like Aadhaar. Second, it is undemocratic to exclude so many voters on the suspicion that they may not be Indian citizens. The rushed deadline is a valid complaint, but when Mamata Banerjee—who will contest in the Bengal assembly polls next year—also raises the same issue, the argument loses much of its force. As for non-use of Aadhaar, it was never intended to be proof of citizenship. The EC seems to have done most of the job already, and, if needed, can give political parties an additional week or two to raise objections to the exclusions. The second argument is patently wrong, for it is the EC's job to see that non-citizens are not allowed to vote in India. As long as no eligible voter is excluded, it cannot be blamed. To ensure the latter, all political parties have been given the opportunity to re-insert names they think have been unfairly removed from the draft list. Even after the draft is published on 1 August, voters have time till the end of the month to make corrections. That said, one must point out that voters' lists are not foolproof because the EC does not have enough full-time staff to keep lists updated year-round in all states. Its work begins more or less a few months ahead of a general or state election, and most of the work is done by state officials under the EC's overall direction. Most states will not spare staff a year ahead of elections to do this job of filtering out ineligible voters and adding new ones. Also read: A year after Bangladesh's Monsoon Revolution, a parched summer looms ahead Case of Bangladeshi, Pakistani citizens The truth is not just SIR, but the compilation of a regularly-updated National Register of Citizens (NRC) would be an equally legitimate exercise. But as the Assam NRC showed, such an exercise would force Hindus who may have fled persecution in Bangladesh or Pakistan to be struck off the rolls and denied citizenship rights, too. The Assam NRC used not just documents, but family trees to determine citizenship. The politics of SIR or NRC involves two separate questions: one is about citizenship and the eligibility to vote. The other—unstated—issue is the demographic challenge in eastern border states of West Bengal, Assam, Jharkhand, and Bihar, which have been quietly settled by Muslims as well as Hindus from Bangladesh. The BJP view—which I agree with—is that we cannot treat illegals who may be persecuted in Bangladesh in the same way as those who are merely coming here for livelihoods. The Modi government tried to partially signal this differentiation through the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019, but the cutoff date for fast-tracking citizenship for eligible minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan was 31 December 2014, which made the exercise minimalist. Useful for political signalling, but of no real help to the lakhs of Bangladeshi minorities seeking to flee persecution even today. The only logical way out for the BJP is to enact a 'right to return' law for Hindus and minorities from Pakistan and Bangladesh—much like the one Israel has for Jews living outside Israel. In India's case, it would mean offering minorities in our neighbouring countries the right to enter India and seek fast-track citizenship. Both Pakistan and Bangladesh continue to persecute their minorities, and do not want to give Hindus equal rights on a par with Muslims. By no stretch of imagination can the reduction in Bangladesh's Hindu population from 22 per cent in 1951 to less than eight per cent in the last census be called anything other than steady ethnic cleansing through coercion and intimidation. The demographic challenge is particularly acute in India's east and north-east, where several districts are now Muslim majority, and others are showing a steadily rising share of Muslims. This is what drove Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma to clearly state what the real issue is. In posts made over the last few days on X (formerly Twitter), Sarma made statements that no politician has previously dared to make. Sanjay Hegde, a lawyer, noted that it was not right to equate all Bengali Muslims with Bangladeshi Muslims. He wrote: 'Not every Bengali-speaking Muslim in Assam is a Bangladeshi. The history and geography of Assam and undivided Bengal are far too complex for such lazy thinking.' To which Sarma replied boldly, avoiding political correctness. While agreeing with Hegde that the issue was complex, Samra was crystal clear in identifying the problem for what it was: the steady change in religious demography. 'Legally, all of them may not be foreigners. But we, the people of Assam—especially Hindus—are becoming a hopeless minority in our own land. All this has happened over a span of just 60 years. We have lost our culture, our land, our temples. The law gives us no remedy. That's why we are desperate—not for revenge, but for survival. Yes, we may be fighting a losing battle. But we will go down fighting—with dignity, within the law, and for the soul of our Assam. Do not stop us. Just do not stop us from fighting for what is ours. For us, this is our last battle of survival,' he wrote on X. Thus far, no Opposition politician has given Sarma any kind of evidence-based rebuttal. In response to Mamata Banerjee's attempt to convert the issue into a Bengali-non-Bengali one, Sarma was even bolder in his assertions. 'Didi, let me remind you. In Assam, we are not fighting our own people. We are fearlessly resisting the ongoing, unchecked Muslim infiltration from across the border, which has already caused an alarming demographic shift. In several districts, Hindus are now on the verge of becoming a minority in their own land. This is not a political narrative – it's a reality. Even the Supreme Court of India has termed such infiltration as external aggression. And yet, when we rise to defend our land, culture, and identity, you choose to politicise it.' Courage, maybe. But constitutional clarity is needed, and this can only come if persecuted minorities in our neighbourhood have the right to come to India and settle legally. Ideally, this process should happen through a well-thought-out NRC, and not only through SIR, but both processes have their legitimacy. The political tensions will continue well into the West Bengal and Assam elections next year. The question is: even if minorities from Pakistan and Bangladesh are given a legal right to return to India, what happens to those who are found to be illegal immigrants, especially Muslims? Will Bangladesh take them back when it has avoided even acknowledging the problem? Any clear determination on whether a Bengali is Indian or Bangladeshi needs Dhaka's cooperation. In the current situation, where the interim Mohammad Yunus government, backed by Islamists, is inherently hostile to India, such cooperation seems unlikely. They can be given the right to work, while being denied the vote. This right to work cannot be indefinite, but it is needed as an interim measure so that India need not deport non-citizens as soon as they are identified. It will also be more humane. Additionally, we can use technology to determine who may not be an Indian national. We can use AI and regional dialect recognition patterns to figure out if someone is from a district in India or Bangladesh. What we cannot do is allow non-persecuted Bangladeshi Muslims to change the demography in the border states when sources close to Mohammad Yunus are already talking about Greater Bangladesh and the takeover of India's north-eastern states. Yunus himself has talked about Bangladesh holding the key to India's north-east. So, far from being a needless exercise, SIR must precede every state or general election. It would help if EC could draw on a painstakingly compiled and regularly updated NRC. No serious nation can afford to compromise its borders or allow ineligible foreigners to influence local politics. R Jagannathan is the former editorial director, Swarajya magazine. He tweets @TheJaggi. Views are personal.
