A terror has been haunting countless citizens of India— the terror of being disenfranchised if they are declared defaulters in complying with the fiats of The Election Commission of India (ECI), stripped of its apparent neutrality and virtually turned an appendage to the ruling dispensation, which goes under the name of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. After Bihar, where elections have concluded, 51 crore electors of 12 more states and UTs would have to submit prescribed enumeration forms complying with most hazardous and inexplicable, if not incongruent, formalities by 4 December to remain on the draft electoral roll and by implication qualify as citizen of India. When common people are bleeding white under extreme economic exploitation, strangulated by ruthless politicaly oppression and assailed by polluted socio-cultural milieu, a Damocles’ sword has been made hang over them.
Hitherto Followed Practice of Electoral Role Revision
Annual revision of the voter list is a regular procedure. It is done every year. Names of new eligible voters are added, and the names of the diseased persons or absentees are deleted. The updated voter list is generally published on 1 January every year. There is also a provision of additions, alterations or deletions, if any, between two publications. Anyone or any political party can also register their objections with proper proof about existence of names of fake or ineligible voters to the Election Commission. After independence, electoral rolls have been updated in three ways— intensive revision, summary revision or continuous revision. With the last electoral roll, the authorized persons of the ECI used to go house to house, verify existence of the names and deleted the names of the diseased or those having shifted residence to some other constituency. No documents were asked for even during 2002 revision exercise. Also, the ECI used to declare the dates when new voters could enumerate their names based on prescribed documents like birth certificate, Aadhaar card, etc. But Special Intensive Revision with a view to a thorough overhauling of the list by asking each and every voter who does not feature in the rolls of 2002 to submit fresh form of enumeration accompanied by some newly prescribed documents like date of birth of the parents, lease deeds of land, etc., and affixing latest photos had never been undertaken hereinbefore. Thus, all those who cannot be traced back to the last intensive revision of rolls in 2002 would be required to submit documents to establish their eligibility to remain on the final list as per SIR.This exercise is completed in Bihar and now would be rolled out in 12 states and UTs slated to for election in the coming year.
Why is this SIR?
The BJP government guided by its arch communal Hindutva doctrine has suddenly ‘discovered’ that there is a huge number of “illegal migrants” or “foreigners” whose names are featuring on the list. So those are to be identified, and their names removed from the list. And it is of the opinion that such intruders are mostly Muslims from Bangladesh who have entered the country illegally and staying here unlawfully. So, is necessitated this massive exercise to detect the illegal migrants and send them back to their countries.
Now, the question is who can be voters? According to clause 16 of The Representation of the People’s Act 1950, “a person shall be disqualified for registration in an electoral roll if not a citizen of India”. The voters’ list is being prepared by the Election Commission, an autonomous body. And so, if the name of any person appears on the voters’ list, he or she cannot be anyone other than a bona fide Indian citizen. But in 2003, the then BJP government led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, brought an amendment to the People’s Representation Act which held that those who were born after 1987 cannot be straightway recognized as Indian citizens. They have to prove their Indian citizenship by producing evidence that one of their parents is or was a citizen of India. Now the ECI is saying that voting eligibility of those born after 1987 is to be proved by confirming that any of their parents was a voter as per 2002 electoral roll. Clearly, this is akin to The Citizenship (Amendment) Act of 2003 which significantly amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 and introduced, inter alia the term “illegal migrant” and establishing provisions for the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRIC). This amendment also modified how citizenship is acquired by birth, descent, and registration. What happened in Assam NRC exercise? After making all possible efforts to anyhow exclude certain category of genuine Indian citizens belonging to the Muslim community, it turned out that of 19 lakh “illegal migrants” so discovered by the authorities,12 lakhs are Hindus. And now, there is a fresh attempt to undertake that NRC exercise in disguise to justify at any cost the theory of “mass infiltration of Bangladeshi Muslims and Rohingyas” and thereby intensify the anti-Muslim hatred to consolidate Hindu vote bank. And for that, an initial homework was done by changing the selection procedure of the Election Commissioners. So long, the Chief Election Commissioner and two of his or her deputies were selected by a committee comprising the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. But in 2023, the BJP government amended the rule to substitute the CJI by a cabinet minister. Selection Committee will consist of the Prime Minister, a Union Cabinet Minister, and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha. Thus, at any point of time, the government nominees would be elected even if the Leader of the Opposition raises objection. And accordingly, officials pliant to the government dictates have been picked up to constitute the new ECI and thereby making the Commission a virtual appendage to the government. And so, the newly appointed ECI is tasked to carry out the job of verifying citizenship, which is not in its jurisdiction, under the garb of electoral revision.
Harassment of the Voters
The ECI has declared at least one of the 11 documents has to be produced with the SIR application form. Though the Aadhaar Card is now treated as the 12th Document after the order of the Supreme Court, the list of required documents starts with passports. How many Indians have this? Certainly, very few. How many Indians have birth certificates or school certificates? How many of them have the birth details of their parents? How many of them possess land and have a deed? There are countless people who have lost their documents due to flood, landslides, fire, or other natural calamities and accidents. This was evident during so called NRC exercise in Assam. Now each and every voter has to fill up fresh enumeration forms complying with all formalities. Can the poor or illiterate fulfil such stipulations? In fact, there are reports that out of fear of not possessing any of the prescribed documents, some persons have committed suicide also. Is it that people have voted a government to trigger suicides of the citizens? Moreover, if ECI alleges that someone is not a citizen, it is incumbent on the ECI to prove it. Why should the alleged person need to prove that.
Hidden Motive Behind SIR
The government is arguing that many of the illegal migrants have “managed” to secure Aadhar cards, ration cards and even voter cards through illegal means. Assuming that is true, how could they get those things unless a corrupt racket is in operation in league with a corrupt administration? And whose responsibility is this to check such illegal activities? Aadhaar needs biometric details. How could those biometric details be manipulated and fed into the server to extract Aadhaar card? How can the government fight shy of its responsibility of preventing such illegal activities? Secondly, how can infiltrators enter the country when borders are guarded 24×7 by paramilitary force? Whom does the Border Security Force (BSF) report to? The Union Home Minister. Are we then to conclude that the BSF is either hopelessly incompetent or in connivance with the trespassers or the middlemen organizing such cross-border infiltration in exchange for money? When the Congress was in power, the present PM Modi had fired salvos against the then government for the same reason. And now when his government is ruling, he is tight-lipped over the matter.
Home Minister Amit Shah once claimed that there are 2 crore illegal infiltrators in the country. Pertinent to mention that in 2019, the then Bangladesh government requested the Indian government to provide a list of Bangladeshi nationals living illegally in India and stated it would allow them to return if their nationality was verified through proper channels. But the Indian government replied that they do not have any such list. Then where does the Indian Home Minister get the figure from? The BJP leader of the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikary, a TMC turncoat, claimed that 1 lakh Rohingyas are living in West Bengal. Can he confirm that based on evidence? No. Because the number of stateless hapless Rohingyas, originally residents of Myanmar and criminally driven out by the ruling junta there, would hardly be a thousand in West Bengal. Rohingyas are targeted because they profess Islam. What is it other than reflection of obtuse, inane and vile communal outlook which militates against the very concept of a civilized mind?
The inner story is that the ruling BJP and its mentor RSS want to delete the names of voters particularly belonging to the religious minority sections who, the BJP leaders consider as supporters of the opposition. At the same time, attempt is being made to insert new names of the BJP’s own supporters even if that requires tampering with the procedure and striking deals with the pliant ECI.
Result of SIR in Bihar
These derivations are not on assumptions but corroborated by available facts. The draft electoral rolls, released in early-August, had included 7.24 crore people, and finally excluded around 47 lakh voters. But those exclusions did not declare any voters deemed ineligible — they were related to voters who were dead, absent, shifted, or registered more than once. On the contrary, 21.53 lakh new voters have been added. Though the ECI and the government touted SIR in Bihar as a smooth process with significant form submissions, the claim is riddled with contradictions and poses a serious threat to voter enfranchisement. Despite claims of progress, with a mere 11% of the estimated electorate submitting forms, conflicting statements from the ECI highlight deep-seated issues. For example, 16.93 lakh voters had reportedly applied for fresh registration as voters. But actual numbers ECI has freshly registered in the final list are 21.6 lakh voters. How did the ECI find 3.7 lakh additional voters register?
Next is that 33% of the total votes deleted are those of Muslims when they constitute merely 16% of the total voter population.PM Modi had asked the Bihar voters in a rally Bihar, “Tell me, will you decide the future of or will ‘foreign infiltrators? “Playing a second fiddle, Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that the SIR had successfully removed them from Bihar’s electoral rolls. While the Election Commission had said on 24 June that one of the reasons for the conduct of the SIR so close to the elections was the presence of ‘foreigners’ on the voter rolls, the poll body has not yet provided any figures of the number of such foreigners found at the end of the exercise. The poll body has not even provided the reasons for the deletions of 47 lakh voters from the rolls.
A media report says that after the dataset, it was found that only 9,500 people out of 7.42 crore voters were detected ineligible. Percentage wise, it is only 0.012 of the total voters. Is it worth troubling around 8 crore voters and incur so huge expenditure from public exchequer to find a few thousand? Rightly observed Shri Yogendra Yadav, an Indian activist and psephologist that it is tantamount to “using a hammer to kill a fly sitting on your nose”. Also, names of the so called dalits, the backward class people, and women have been deleted randomly. A vast section of the migrant workers who were outside also could not submit their documents to the BLOs. In some slum areas, no proper meticulous survey was done.
Secondly, 85 percent of the voters declared ineligible in Bihar were clustered in four districts along the state’s border with Nepal: Supaul, Kishanganj, West Champaran, and East Champaran. Another finding says that of just 313 infiltrators detected in Bihar only 78 are Muslims which prove that the major theme in the BJP’s electoral campaign about the presence of thousands and thousands of ‘illegal Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants’ proves to be hoax. Moreover, votes have been found to have increased in the BJP strongholds while the elections have mainly been in the constituencies where the opposition has a better following.
A report of ‘Reporters Collective’ revealed that the final Bihar voter roll for all 243 assembly constituencies now holds 14.35 lakh suspect duplicate entries. Of these, 3.4 lakh entries are exact matches on all three demographic parameters: name, relative’s name, and age. This is another mystery. Since 2018, ECI has been having a software called ERONET which can detect similarities in names, names of relatives, addresses, and ages to identify suspect duplicates and fraud. It can also match photographs on Voter IDs (called EPIC) to detect potential fraud and duplicates. Then how could so many duplications remain undetected? It is alleged that several BJP leaders had voted in both Delhi and Bihar Assembly polls. Other anomalies include clubbing of 650 voters in at least 20 households, voters whose addresses are marked as zero (0) and so forth.
Maharashtra Scenario
In the Lok Sabha election in Maharashtra held in May 2024, the BJP-led alliance trailed behind the opposition bloc of Congress-Shiv Sena (U) and NCP (S). But in the Assembly election in November2024, the result was reversed. In just five months, Maharashtra’s voters in the electoral rolls grew by a staggering 46 lakhs, concentrated across 12,000 polling booths in 85 constituencies, predominantly in areas where the BJP had lost in the parliamentary elections. This does defy demographic logic. The surge was clustered in seats the ruling alliance won and came in abrupt spurts rather than through a steady, organic process, raising urgent questions about electoral integrity and official accountability. Official records also showed discrepancies, with the ECI reporting over 9.64 crore voters on 30 August 2024, while the CEO of Maharashtra reported 9.53 crore for the same date. Within weeks, these numbers fluctuated sharply, with a sudden increase of over 16 lakh voters between 15 and 30 October 2024. VFD report also brought to the fore that during the November 2024 polls, Maharashtra recorded a sudden late-night surge in turnout. At 5 p.m., voter turnout stood at 58.22%, but by midnight it had risen to 66.05%, a jump of 7.83%, which amounted to about 48 lakh extra votes.
Manipulation of Electoral Roll
Glaringly, voters’ lists across India, as is gradually coming to light, are being manipulated via fake additions and deletions. The grave danger is that technology and other offline resources are being deployed to manipulate the voters’ lists on a scale that is threatening the democratic process and denying the people their voting choice. These voter surges, data mismatches, and procedural lapses smack of ‘weaponization’ of India’s election system in favour of the ruling dispensation.
The right to vote is a constitutional right in adult franchisee. Depriving any genuine citizen of this right is subversive of the constitutional mandate. Also using tricks to manipulate people’s verdict is nothing short of an offence and an affront to the bourgeois parliamentary system the bourgeois petty-bourgeois parties are loud protagonists of. But will the citizens remain silent onlookers or rise in protest against this menacing development in the name of SIR and close rank to expose this design.
