Oppn's ‘bulk' objections to SIR not entertained: EC
The EC said such submissions could not be processed under the formal "claims and objections" mechanism, but were being treated as general complaints and verified accordingly.
The clarification came after the opposition INDIA bloc accused the EC of "doing politics" and attempting to set a "narrative" that no political party had submitted complaints about the draft voter roll published on Aug 1. The EC's latest bulletin on Tuesday reiterated that no "claims or objections" had been filed by any of the 12 recognised national and state parties in the 11 days since publication.
However, the EC confirmed receiving 13,970 claims and objections directly from individual electors, 341 of which have already been disposed of.
Leader of the opposition in Bihar Assembly, Tejashwi Pratap Yadav, said the bloc was not questioning the SIR itself but the manner in which it was carried out. "We are not questioning the special intensive revision, rather the way it was carried out. There could be no bigger crime than an elector missing the chance to cast their vote," he said, alleging that many names had been deleted from the rolls, while some electors lacked documents or were living outside the state.
by Taboola
by Taboola
Sponsored Links
Sponsored Links
Promoted Links
Promoted Links
You May Like
NRIs Living In Ukraine Are Eligible For INR 2 Lakh Monthly Pension. Invest 18K/Month
investmentlife.policybazaar
Get Offer
Undo
He accused the BJP of using the EC to achieve "what it has failed to do itself."
Tejashwi also claimed the EC had repeatedly ignored Supreme Court guidance and accused it of misusing its position as a constitutional body. Referring to deputy chief minister Vijay Kumar Sinha allegedly possessing two EPICs, he said, "Nobody would have perhaps known that if I had not exposed it."
Congress legislature party leader in the assembly, Shakeel Ahmad Khan, alleged that "an uncountable number" of claims and objections had been sent to the EC, which he accused of "denying reality."
He said Rahul Gandhi's request for an appointment to present proof of "vote chori" was declined. RJD spokesperson Chitranjan Gagan argued that the opposition had sought a category-wise list of voters marked as dead, shifted or duplicated, but had not received it, making it difficult for party agents to file claims or objections in the required format.
CPI-ML state secretary Kunal claimed hundreds of objections had been filed through booth-level and local committees, citing one complaint about the deletion of 63 names under the Jale Assembly constituency.
He alleged that the EC was "trying to set a narrative" that nothing was wrong with the rolls.
An EC official, however, maintained that parties had failed to follow the stipulated procedure. "They were supposed not to send the claims/objections in bulk but one by one. So they were not entertained," the official said, adding that the submissions were now being reviewed as general complaints to verify their authenticity.
Stay updated with the latest local news from your
city
on
Times of India
(TOI). Check upcoming
bank holidays
,
public holidays
, and current
gold rates
and
silver prices
in your area.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
3 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Citizen-State relations and the burden of document raj
For over a month now, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has ensnared the bulk of Bihar's voting population in a maze of paperwork, thanks to its Special Intensive Review (SIR) of the voter rolls. In the process, widely accepted documents — Aadhaar, ration card and the voter card itself — have been declared suspect, despite the Supreme Court's intervention. Through executive fiat, ECI has created a new, arbitrary document hierarchy, declaring 11 specific documents — some of which even the most privileged Indians struggle to procure — as appropriate for determining citizenship. Now, as the process moves to the question of deletions from the voter rolls and the very real threat of disenfranchisement, ECI is obdurately hiding behind its paperwork, refusing public access to the list of deleted names. This tyranny of paper is also at the centre of another controversy. The enduring image of Rahul Gandhi's recent press conference is the seven-foot-high stack of paper — the physical electoral rolls — that the Congress team trawled through to identify discrepancies. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. (HT Photo) In different ways, both episodes reveal one of the most pernicious aspects of the exercise of State power in India — the use of documents to mediate citizen-State relations and their role in feeding the State's obsession with ordering citizens into administrative categories of 'eligible' and 'ineligible'. Bureaucratic norms cohere around the idea that 'good governance' is about weeding out the 'ineligible'. At one level, this is a legitimate governance impulse. After all, who will disagree with the need to ensure that all citizens access their rights, particularly voting rights, and that no 'ineligible' person misuses the system? However, the practices this unleashes often lead to the kind of documentation chaos as we are witnessing in Bihar. Worse, it opens the window for co-opting bureaucratic practices into legitimising exclusionary political projects. In hiding behind its mounds of paper, obdurately refusing to make its processes and documents transparent to the public, ECI has demonstrated how effectively the State can weaponise paper even in pursuit of ostensibly legitimate goals. Proving eligibility via documents is a unique burden that the Indian State places on its citizens. After Partition, governments in India and Pakistan adopted the practice of adjudicating citizenship claims by evaluating documents such as passports and, later, ration/voter cards that claimants possessed to determine their authenticity as citizens. This, as political scientist Niraja Jayal has argued, inverted the standard relationship between citizenship and documents. In most contexts, the possession of citizenship is the means to acquire identity documents such as passports. In the Indian case, documents became the means for determining citizenship. This penchant for relying on documents to mediate citizenship soon extended to routine administrative tasks. The Indian bureaucracy's obsession with paper (files, orders, documents) is well known. Anthropologist Mathew Hull traces this to the colonial bureaucracy's distrust of local Indian functionaries, which manifested itself in kaghaz raj or 'documentary rule'. Only through a connection with paper, Hull argues, could an action be construed as an action. Contemporary Indian bureaucracy adopted this practice and extended this culture of distrust to how it deals both with itself and with the public at large. In dealing with the public, documents — ration cards, BPL cards, job cards, Aadhaar cards, voter cards — came to play the role of gatekeepers. For citizens, they are the primary means to make themselves visible to the State and place claims. For the State, they are the means through which it seeks to 'see' society, categorising the population into administratively legible segments that become the basis for administrative action. The culture of distrust that underpins this allowed for an intriguing twist. The State took it upon itself to categorise the population as 'eligible' and 'ineligible'; after all, corruption enables the 'ineligible' beneficiary to access the State. But to achieve this goal, the bureaucracy appropriated the power to verify its own documents, casting suspicion both on its documents and, rather conveniently, on those in possession of these documents. This administrative suspicion can easily be weaponised and placed in service of political projects, as we are now witnessing in Bihar. Words like 'verification', 'authentication', 'deletion' and 'doubtful' are routinely deployed in administrative parlance. The citizen is a suspicious actor, in constant need of verification. It is this bureaucratic impulse that has allowed the ECI, with absolutely no irony, to claim the voter card, distributed by its own machinery, to be inaccurate, leaving it to the Supreme Court judges to remind the ECI of the principle of 'presumption of correctness'. Crucially, it is precisely this suspicion that can become a convenient weapon in the politics of exclusion. Political narratives of 'infiltrators' and outsiders find legitimacy precisely because the State regularly reminds us of how suspiciously it views its documents, allowing itself the luxury of authenticating documents at will. It should be no surprise that the spectre of NRC is writ large over the SIR as well. As the SIR and electoral roll controversy unfolds, the risk of mass disenfranchisement (6.5 million deletions in the draft list), procedural arbitrariness, the constitutional overreach of ECI, and its sheer incompetence are at the centre of the ongoing political and legal challenge. The debate, however, is missing a deeper interrogation into the tyranny of paper and the culture of distrust it has entrenched that makes even our institutions capable of undermining democracy and citizens' rights. The struggle to protect democratic freedoms must extend to interrogating and indeed challenging the culture of kaghaz raj within the State that makes critical independent public institutions vulnerable. Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal.
The Hindu
3 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Suresh Gopi maintains silence on voter list discrepancies as protests by BJP, CPI(M) rock Thrissur
Political tempers flared in Thrissur on Wednesday as the controversy over alleged voter list manipulation ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections spilled onto the streets, triggering protests by Bharatiya Janata Party and Communist Party of India (Marxist) workers. Amid the tension, Union Minister and Thrissur MP Suresh Gopi arrived in the city at 9.30 a.m., his first visit since the allegations surfaced. While greeted with a grand reception by BJP workers at the railway station under tight security, he avoided interaction with the media, responding only with a sarcastic statement: 'Thanks for all your help.' Throughout the day, he refused to address media questions on alleged electoral irregularities involving him and his family. He did not respond to questions about the attacks on clergy in Chhattisgarh and Odisha too. Mr. Gopi visited Aswini Hospital to meet five BJP workers injured in clashes with CPI(M) activists on Tuesday night and later inspected his camp office, where CPI(M) demonstrators had poured black oil on the signboard. He skipped the BJP protest march, travelling via Angamaly to visit family of nun Preethi Mary, who was attacked in Chhattisgarh, before proceeding to Kothamangalam to meet the family of a student who recently died by suicide. Unrest began on Tuesday evening when CPI(M) workers marched to Mr. Gopi's office over the voter list row, blackening its nameboard. The police arrested one activist involved. Tension escalated as BJP workers launched a counter-march to the CPI(M) office. An altercation followed, leaving five BJP activists with minor injuries. On Wednesday morning, the BJP district committee, led by former State president K. Surendran and State general secretary Shobha Surendran, marched to the City Police Commissioner's office demanding action against those responsible for the attack on the MP's office and party workers. The police blocked the march with barricades, prompting workers to climb over them waving party flags. Water cannons were deployed three times to disperse the crowd, but the protesters stood their ground. Addressing a public meeting later, Mr. Surendran warned the CPI(M) and the Congress against 'trampling upon the mandate' of the people of Thrissur. Ms. Shobha Surendran denounced the vandalism at the MP's office as an insult to democracy and the city's voters. The CPI(M) too took out a protest march against attack on its office by the BJP workers. The All India Youth Federation, which staged a night march on Tuesday, accused the Election Commission of being reduced to a political instrument of the Sangh Parivar and demanded a stronger wave of public protests against voter list manipulation. Addressing the march, CPI State Council member K.K. Valsaraj accused the Centre of using its influence to dismantle the democratic election process, alleging collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission in large-scale voter list tampering. He criticised the continued silence of Mr. Gopi, calling it suspicious, and accused the Election Commission of trivialising serious allegations with 'nonsensical' explanations.
Indian Express
3 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Now, a mayor in Bihar gets Election Commission notice ‘for 2 voter IDs'
The Election Commission of India (ECI) issued a notice to Muzaffarpur mayor Nirmala Devi and two of her relatives on Wednesday for allegedly possessing two voter IDs — a development that comes hours after Bihar's Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Prasad Yadav flagged the alleged violation. In a notice to Muzaffarpur Mayor Nirmala Devi, the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) of Muzaffarpur Assembly constituency wrote that it had come to the authority's notice that she possessed two separate Election Photo Identity Card numbers. EPIC number is the unique 10-digit number assigned to each voter by the Election Commission of India. 'We have learnt that your name has appeared as a voter in SIR draft roll at booth number 153 and at booth number 257,' the EC's notice said. It added, 'We have also found that your name had been mentioned as a voter at both booths before the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process. You are requested to explain your position before 5 pm on August 16 so that we can take further action.' In a post on X, the Muzaffarpur district magistrate said notice had been issued to Nirmala Devi and two of her relatives 'for clarification by the Electoral Registration Officer of Assembly Constituency No. 94 — Muzaffarpur in the matter related to placing names in two polling stations.' This came hours after Tejashwi alleged at a press conference that the mayor had two voter ID cards. It also comes days after the Election Commission of India issued a notice to Bihar deputy chief minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Vijay Kumar Sinha for possessing two voter identity cards. 'While ECI has been targeting our voters by striking off their names from electoral rolls during the ongoing SIR process, it has been giving two voter cards to people having affiliation with the BJP in the same Assembly segment. Muzaffarpur mayor Nirmala Devi, who is closely associated with the BJP and is a prospective candidate in the upcoming Assembly polls, has been issued two voter ID cards,' he alleged. Devi said she is yet to receive the notice. 'Once I receive it, I will respond accordingly,' she told reporters. This comes at a time when the Election Commission of India's voter rolls revision exercise has been a subject of controversy. Called Special Intensive Revision, the exercise is aimed at updating electoral rolls, but the Opposition has been protesting against it, claiming it could potentially disenfranchise lakhs of people.
