Opposition protests against SIR in Parliament complex
Led by Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, the MPs of INDIA bloc raised "vote chor, gaddi chhor" and "vote chori band karo" slogans. They also held a big banner that read "vote chori" and held posters demanding "stop SIR".
Leaders of Congress, TMC, DMK, Left parties and RJD and Samajwadi Party were seen holding posters and banners right outside the Makar Dwar of Parliament.
Amid speculation that the opposition is mulling an impeachment motion against CEC Gyanesh Kumar, Congress leader Naseer Hussain told reporters they would use every democratic method to ensure that the Chief Election Commissioner should be a person who is "unbiased".
The opposition has been protesting in both Houses of Parliament against the SIR, alleging that the EC's exercise is aimed at "disenfranchising voters" in Bihar ahead of the assembly elections due later this year.
They have been demanding a discussion on the issue in both Houses.
Barring discussions on Operation Sindoor in the two Houses, Parliament has seen little business ever since the Monsoon session began on July 21 due to repeated adjournments, mostly over the SIR issue.
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Hans India
28 minutes ago
- Hans India
MyVoice: Views of our readers 21st Aug 2025
India to have a south Indian V-P Election to the august post of Vice-President has been necessitated by the sudden resignation of incumbent Jagdeep Dhankar. The September 9 election is a brutal south vs. south showdown as both the ruling and opposition groups have nominated candidates from the southern states. C.P. Radhakrishnan from Tamil Nadu, the NDA nominee, is pitted against Justice Buchireddy Sudarshan Reddy from Telangana as the I.N.D.I.A bloc candidate. However, there is a lot of difference between the two contenders. While Radhakrishnan was an active politician until he became Maharashtra's Governor, Justice Reddy hails from an agrarian family and has a long experience in judiciary, whose apt decisions can enrich our democratic functioning. But there is a clear majority for the ruling nominee in the electoral college. It is an ideological battle that is being held amid growing issues like SIR in Bihar, vote-theft orchestration during the Karnataka and Maharashtra elections and introduction of bills that empower arrest and exit of political leaders if they spend 30 days in jail. Pratapa Reddy Yaramala, Tiruvuru (AP) Onus on GHMC chief This has reference to the news that the GHMC has received around 152 complaints during the Prajavani. Everyone is aware of the perennial issues that have been tormenting citizens for several years now. Many of them air their grievances through media platforms. The common complaints revolve around damaged and overflowing roads, fully occupied footpaths, manholes, undetectable ditches, sagging electrical wires, stray dogs and mosquito menace, to name just a few. The GHMC commissioner must sort out all these recurring issues and provide permanent solutions. It is one way the people can be assured of a clean and healthy environment. Gudipati Shanti Priya, Secunderabad Safety measures during Ganesh visarjan I have been deeply concerned about the tragic incident (THI August 20) in which two youngsters lost their lives after a Ganesh idol accidentally came in contact with high-tension wires in Bandlaguda. This unfortunate accident occurred a day after a similar electrocution case was reported in Ramanthapur. These expose the safety lapses during public processions. Deaths of the two youth are a reminder of the dangers posed by unsafe overhead power lines in residential and procession routes. Despite denials of negligence by the electricity department, it is evident that precautionary measures were far from satisfactory. Festivals are meant to joyfully unite communities and not end in tragedies due to avoidable hazards. It is imperative that local authorities, electricity boards, and civic bodies coordinate better to ensure that idols are transported safely. Temporary shutdowns of high-tension lines, clear markings, and designated safe routes must be mandated during the festive season. I urge the concerned authorities to treat this as a serious public safety issue. Chalking out preventive measures and implementing them can save lives. Varsha Omprakash, St. Francis College for Women ISRO's vision is a matter of pride I'd like to appreciate the report 'ISRO working on 40-storey tall rocket: ISRO Chief' (THI, Aug 20). It fills me with pride to see India setting its sights on such an ambitious mission — a rocket capable of carrying a 75-tonne payload into space. For decades, ISRO has shown the world that dedication and innovation can achieve extraordinary results, even with limited resources. From Chandrayaan to Mangalyaan, our space scientists have made India a respected name in global space exploration. This new project, envisioning a 40-storey rocket, reflects not just scientific progress but also the confidence of a nation aiming high. Such initiatives inspire millions of students to dream of careers in science and technology. They also strengthen our country's role in satellite communication, climate monitoring, and global collaborations. More importantly, they prove that India's future lies in combining vision with perseverance. I wholeheartedly applaud ISRO's leadership for daring to think big and for continuing to expand the horizons of our nation. Achievements like these remind us that the sky is no longer the limit. Vallari, St Francis College for Women
Hindustan Times
28 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Paper trails, lost salaries: Stories of struggle, success in Bihar SIR drive
The first phase of the controversial special intensive revision (SIR) in Bihar excised 6.56 million names from the state's voter rolls. The exclusions have generated a political firestorm and reverberated in Parliament and the Supreme Court. But another key facet are the 72.4 million people who managed to fill their forms. Across five districts, HT attempts to sketch the contours of the exercise, shaped by identities, differing access to government services, migration and socioeconomic status. Paper trails, lost salaries: Stories of struggle, success in Bihar SIR drive Chandan Das, Tilhari Village A flight of three steep steps leads a visitor to the meeting room of Tilhari village chief Shakunta Devi and her husband, Chandan Das. Under framed faces of Bhagat Singh, BR Ambedkar and Ravidas, the room teems with clots of people anxious about their names on the electoral roll – one has a brother toiling away in Hyderabad who cannot come back to fill the forms, a second has no document other than Aadhaar card in her name since her marriage in this village five years ago, and a third is worried that she might have missed her BLO and will be marked absent. In this peri-urban village of 900-odd people dominated by marginalised castes, a white sheet of paper stamped with the panchayat logo, signed by Das, and a photograph of the applicant affixed is lucrative. Das has signed roughly 250 of these letters since July 1, filling the gap in access to formal documentation. 'In our village, most are poor. The problem here is birth certificates and only 10% of people have caste papers. So what else can we do to help them?' asked Das, who was once associated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). In his early 30s, the husband of the village chief unofficially executes many of the official functions of his wife. He had thought that the publication of the draft roll on August 1 would mean an end to the frenetic pace of work. 'Not a lot of names in this village were deleted so that's a relief. It means the letters worked,' he said. But now, there is a new problem. 'Naam bohot ka gadbad kar diya hai (they've made a lot of mistakes with the names) – Rai in place of Ram, father-in-law in place of father,' Das said. 'I went through the draft list for an hour with the BLO and found 6-7 such mistakes,' he added. In front of him is Rekha Devi, whose father-in-law Yaddu Manjhi's name is misspelt. Next to her is Ruby Devi whose husband's name Bhagiran Manjhi is now spelt as Jhageru Manjhi. Behind them on the floor are Ram Bhuvan whose name is spelt as Rai Bhuvan and Rukmini Devi, now erroneously spelt as Kamini Devi. They all have to fill a form and submit it to the BLO before September 1. Such errors are not new but the stringent SIR process has locals worried. 'We are illiterate so we have come to request pradhan sahab to help us,' said Rekha Devi. It's back to the grind for the young politician. Kaiser Alam, Asura village The tranquil waters of the Kankai river hug the international border between India and Nepal through most of its course, before spilling into the Mahananda in Bihar's Kishanganj district. Its banks on either side are dotted with hundreds of villages and the occasional makeshift bridge – like the one on the edges of Asura village. In this part of the world, formal jobs are scarce and most people are manual labourers, farm hands or fishers. The few skilled people either migrate out of the state or the country for decently paying jobs. Kaiser Alam, a stonemason, is one of them. Courtesy his travel, the 41-year-old has a passport – one of the 11 documents the Election Commission of India is accepting as proof of address. But his wife, Mohsina Khatun, has largely remained at home. She doesn't have a passport or an educational certificate. For people like her, the most-popular choice of document is the niwasi or the permanent residency certificate, which is issued by the block office and usually takes between 10 and 15 days. A filled form, a letter from the panchayat and Aadhaar card is all that usually takes. And a bit of luck. Khatun fears her luck might have run out. The mother of five cast her vote in the 2020 assembly polls and the 2024 Lok Sabha polls. 'I applied for it (the certificate) soon after the declaration of SIR on July 3; since then I have been frequenting the block office but till now I haven't got it,' said Alam. This is not uncommon. Across many blocks in Kishanganj, Purnia, and Araria districts, officials temporarily froze the issuance of new certificates in July and August after seeing a sharp spike – tenfold on average – in applications. While this helped ease verification stress, it hurt many applicants. 'I am worried that my wife will be deprived of her franchise,' Alam said. But her luck might turn again. Last week, the Supreme Court told the EC to start allowing the submission of Aadhaar details.. Ajit Rishi, Palasi village Since his teenage years, Ajit Rishi has been somewhat of a busybody. In his village of Palasi in Bihar's Araria district, most people are migrant labourers and hail from the Mahadalit Musahar caste. Rishi himself is Dalit, having appended Rishi to his name in an attempt to dispel the stigma binding the impoverished community once forced to eat rats to stave off hunger. Rishi spent most of his teenage years in odd jobs. By his early 30s, he had become a ward member in the panchayat, leveraging his community ties and numerous small favours he was owed. Literacy remains low among the 537 voters, most of whom are from the Dalit communities and work as day labourers. 'You can understand that very few people here understood what the papers meant when the SIR forms were first given out,' said Rishi. The partially pre-filled forms were distributed by the local schoolteacher BLO. But when he came back to pick up the documents days later, he refused to accept Aadhaar or voter identity card – most villagers had photocopied these two and affixed it to the forms – as supporting documents. 'First they said fill only the form, then said give it with documents. Then, they said only the form will do. After that, they said they'll come back for a document check. For us villagers, it was very confusing,' said Tuntun Rishi, a resident. That's when Rishi stepped in. 'We formed a strategy. For some, I helped them fill the form in Hindi and added their Mahadalit certificate or card myself. For some others, I filled out the form and asked them to add as many documents as they could, especially any card they had got as beneficiary for a SC-specific scheme. We then spoke to the BLO to accept it,' he said. But there were still outliers. Farmhands Baidyanath Rishi and his wife Minti Devi were both in Punjab, having migrated up north for the harvest season, and only their small children were back at their village home in Palasi. 'There were at least 30-40 people from our samaj (community) who were out because the wages at this time of the year are good,' said Rishi. Some responded to missives by their family members but many didn't – in any case, many simply didn't have the kind of documents the BLO was looking for. As July entered its final lap, the pressure on Rishi was mounting as people frequented his house with their anxieties about being struck off the rolls. In a village election, a disgruntled household is enough to swing the polls away from a candidate. Rishi had to keep everyone happy. 'In every village, there is a vikas mitra appointed by the state government to help Mahadalits access official schemes. He has a list of families and dependents. We told him to give us a copy of the list and shared it with the BLO, who we told to mark voters based on that list,' said Rishi. 'People who are outside and couldn't fill their form but were Mahadalit were also helped by this parivarik suchi (family listing),' Rishi said. The workaround sidestepped the document soup as the BLO directly picked up names from the list. 'For some people, who didn't even have Aadhaar, the parivarik suchi was enough,' he said. It was a relief for Rishi, who was increasingly getting anxious about lost labour wages for the many hours he spent filling forms, effectively securing his votes. 'An hour lost means ₹400 gone,' he said. His work, however, is not done yet. Sarima Devi and her husband Jittan Rishi are at sea because he is a migrant labourer who has lately stopped returning home, sending between ₹2,000 and ₹3,000 occasionally for her upkeep. 'My husband has not filled out the form. Plus my name is not on any welfare document so what do I submit?' she asked. Rishi sighed. It is not uncommon in the countryside for a woman to be abandoned by her migrant husband. But for now, getting her name into the voter list is of bigger importance than her personal tragedy. 'I'll talk to someone,' Rishi said. Abdul Javed, Mahendrapur For decades, brothers Abdul Javed and Abdul Hamid shared a common mud courtyard between their huts, a separate kitchen room off to the right, and two string cots outside to entertain evening visitors. In the village of Mahendrapur, the farm hands lived off the main lane, the entrances of their houses marked by dented sheets of tin stapled together in the likeness of a gate. When their children were in school, it became clear that there were no jobs available in the countryside to support the family. Javed's two sons quickly migrated – first to state capital Patna and then to Karnal town in Haryana, where they alternate between working on construction sites and agricultural fields. Pay is more regular and at least four times the rate given in Bihar. 'There are six people in our house and eight people in Hamid's house. It was all going well when the SIR was announced,' Javed said. After one week of confusion, the household swung into action. Now in his 70s, Javed requested a young man from the village to help them understand what was being asked. He then called his elder son Sabbar to spare a day from his otherwise gruelling manual labour schedule, and click photos of every document available with him. As the elder brother, he held all the documents (which included passports because the brothers earlier worked as contract labour in west Asia) and sent photographs of every document on WhatsApp. 'I went to the block headquarters and got the photos printed. I then used the details to fill the form myself on their behalf. The BLO accepted them,' said Javed. Here, every household has more than one member working outside – either in an industrial town in India, or in west Asia. Complicating their already difficult lives are increasing polarisation and stereotypes about Muslims, especially those who speak Bengali. This is all too apparent next door, in Chatia village, where most young men leave home at 18. Ruksana Khatun and her friend Jainur Khatun have helped fill the forms of several male relatives, including their husbands and children, who are in Haryana working in tile factories. 'They only take scanned copies of Aadhaar with them, so we were lucky that the rest of the cards were all at home. We just filled the forms thanks to them,' said Ruksana. Almost everyone here is a migrant, but the share of Muslim people has surged in recent years, bringing with it anxieties and sometimes unfounded allegations about infiltration. In Rampur Kodarkatti, where Muslims make up two-thirds of the population, village chief Rajesh Kumar Singh is a proponent of these theories. Two years ago, he hit the local news when he contacted the police about a man he alleged was Bangladeshi. 'Bengali and Bangladeshi here are the same. 70% came here after Bangladesh was born and changed our demographic,' he said. Girija Devi, Naya Tola For most of her 47 years, Girija Devi has been on the move. Born in a village in Uttar Pradesh near the border with Bihar, Devi was married in Gopalganj district to her husband, Ramprit Prasad, but the first home she built, in Tangrahi village, was engulfed by the Gandak river during a seasonal flood. Bankrupted by the tragedy, Devi and her husband moved to higher ground, to a village named simply as Naya Tola or new neighbourhood – an amalgam of people who'd moved here from various parts of the district after being rendered homeless by Bihar's monsoon sorrow. A mud-and-cement embankment protects most of the settlements in Naya Tola, but also makes life difficult for people like Devi who double up as farmhands. In this slushy landscape, building roads is difficult and the moped is the perfect all-weather vehicle. But the proximity to Kuchaikote town helps in securing odd jobs. For the labourer couple, a day's work means between ₹300 and ₹400. But for the past month, earning has been somewhat sporadic because the couple has skipped days hunting for documents to affix to their electoral forms. Prasad had thought that a family member's name in the land records, or Khatian, would suffice, but has been told by the BLO that it has to be his own name for the document to count. 'Neither I nor my wife are educated. I have given my Aadhaar but they're asking for my birth certificate. Where will I get it?' he asked. Devi faces a bigger conundrum. Women have been asked by the authorities to affix proof that traces their lineage to their fathers. All Devi has is proof of her marriage. 'My parents are dead, and in any case, who will give me any proof there? Women don't get ration cards made in their name,' she said. Across the state, the controversial SIR has erected hurdles to confirm one's place in the voter rolls. But women such as Devi face an additional set of hindrances, because they typically reside away from natal homes from where they have to trace lineage and access documents. Devi doesn't care much about voting or whether her name stays in the rolls. But she's worried about spillover effects. 'Who will put my name back in the rolls once it's struck off? And what'll happen to my ration or schemes?' .
Hindustan Times
28 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
ICSSR issues show-cause to CSDS over past irregularities
New Delhi: The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), an autonomous body under the Union ministry of education, on Wednesday issued a show-cause notice to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), citing past irregularities and 'gross violations' of grant-in-aid rules. ICSSR issues show-cause to CSDS over past irregularities The notice accuses CSDS of releasing misleading election data related to Maharashtra and giving a 'biased interpretation' of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Bihar, allegedly aimed at 'maligning the reputation and image' of the Election Commission of India (ECI). The national body that oversees research in the social sciences in the country, has threatened to cancel and withdraw the grant in aid to CSDS, which it said 'is discretionary in nature,' if the think tank fails to submit its explanation on 'administrative and financial irregularities' and on 'deliberate misrepresentation of facts' within 7 days. This comes a day after Sanjay Kumar, a professor at CSDS Delhi had on Tuesday apologised for his X post on the Maharashtra elections, which wrongly reported a considerable fall in voter numbers in the two assembly seats compared to the Lok Sabha elections. He said the error occurred due to misreading of a row by the data team. 'The tweet has since been removed. I had no intention of dispersing any form of misinformation,' wrote Sanjay Kumar, who is among the most senior researchers at the independent think tank which is known for its analysis of elections. Meanwhile, a case has been registered against Kumar by the district electoral officers (DEO) of Nashik and Nagpur in Maharashtra for allegedly misleading voters with wrong data on the Devlali and Ramtek assembly segments for the Lok Sabha and state elections held in 2024. In its show-cause notice to CSDS director Awadhendra Sharan, seen by HT, the ICSSR said that in a study on Maharashtra polls, CSDS deliberately allowed its employee to 'make incorrect statements in media maligning the reputation and image' of ECI and subsequently retracted from the same 'citing glitches in data analysis regarding elections in Maharashtra.' A CSDS study titled 'How inclusive is EC's special revision exercise?' presented a 'biased interpretation' of the ECI's SIR drive in Bihar and published media stories for 'deliberately scandalizing and maligning the reputation and image' of the constitutional body, ICSSR said. 'And whereas it has also come to notice of ICSSR that CSDS and its employees have deliberately been indulging in data manipulation with a deliberate and malicious action to create a narrative with the intention of undermining the sanctity of the constitution authority such as ECI,' ICSSR said asking the CSDS to reveal its funding source for both the studies. ICSSR in its notice said that CSDS has 'continuously been involved in various irregularities in the past' and was asked to submit response and action taken on those irregularities but, 'no satisfactory response and action taken report has been received from CSDS.' ICSSR listed several past irregularities at CSDS, including appointments of faculty and non-academic staff in violation of University Grants Commission (UGC) and ICSSR guidelines, unauthorized financial benefits, non-conduct of governing body elections, opaque selection of the Director, irregular pension and House Rent Allowance (HRA) payments causing loss of public funds, failure to get annual accounts audited by Comptroller Auditor General (CAG), non-disclosure of Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) funds, and non-compliance with ICSSR's Good Governance principles. Under its 'grant in aid rules to societies and institutions doing research in the field of social sciences (which are outside the scope of University Grants Commission),' ICSSR provides assistance to various societies and institutions doing research in the field of social science. On August 7, 2023, in response to a question in Parliament, the ministry of education informed Lok Sabha that CSDS was allocated ₹13.92 crore over three years (between 2020–21 and the first quarter of 2023–24). 'We have asked CSDS to give an explanation on irregularities and misinterpretation of data within seven days of today's notice in respect. ICSSR will take appropriate action against CSDS as per the provisions of its grant-in-aid rules,' said a senior ICSSR official.
