Bihar storm yet to settle, mega political squall brews with EC’s pan-India SIR drive

The harsh judicial scrutiny and deafening political uproar over its recent experiment in Bihar still fresh in public memory, the Election Commission on Monday (October 27) unveiled the schedule for the first phase of what is to eventually be a pan-India special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

With electoral rolls in as many as 12 states and Union territories, covering over one-thirds of India’s population, to be revised during the exercise set to commence on November 4 with a month-long “house-to-house enumeration phase” and conclude on February 7 next year with the publication of the “final electoral rolls”, the implications of EC’s decision would be anything but routine.

States and UTs to be covered

The jurisdictions to be covered in the exercise include the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Lakshadweep, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, as well as Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and West Bengal, which are all due for assembly polls in the first half of next year.

An SIR for the electoral rolls of Assam, which is also scheduled to go to polls early next year, will be announced separately, said Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, as preparation for a Supreme Court monitored National Register of Citizens for the state is “currently underway and near completion”.

Also read: Nationwide SIR: Why are Opposition parties worried and what next? | Interview

That the massive revision of voter rolls is bound to cause political tremors and test electoral anxieties is obvious. Bihar, where the SIR was concluded on September 30, was but a trailer; covering only a fraction of the 51 crore electors that the upcoming revision will impact but the storm it triggered hasn’t entirely calmed yet.

Political squall brewing

Signs of the political squall that is imminent were quick to come by. In Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister and DMK head MK Stalin huddled together with allies and decided to call for a meeting of all registered political parties of the state on November 2 ostensibly to chart out a strategy to withstand the EC’s move even as his arch rivals from the AIADMK welcomed the SIR as a “game changer”.

In neighbouring Kerala, both the ruling LDF coalition and its principal rivals from the UDF alliance slammed the poll panel, variously dubbing its decision an attempt to “subvert democratic system” through a “unilateral and irrational” designed to “deny citizens their right to vote”.

In perennially volatile Bengal, leaders from chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s ruling Trinamool Congress made it known that they would “not allow” the exercise to be rolled out in the state and warned that any attempt to disenfranchise legitimate voters would trigger “a bloodbath”.

Nationally, the Congress, which, along with its allies in the INDIA bloc, had stalled the monsoon session of Parliament in August with raucous protests against the Bihar SIR, slammed the replication the “disenfranchisement campaign at a national level”.

Also read: AIADMK, DMK clash over voter roll revision in poll-bound Tamil Nadu

Sources in the Samajwadi Party told The Federal that party chief Akhilesh Yadav is likely to make a public statement against the SIR in Uttar Pradesh “very soon” as he is convinced that “like the Bihar SIR, the one in UP will also lead to large scale disenfranchisement of voters from our PDA parivar (backwards, Dalits and religious minorities — the social coalition Akhilesh has been trying to build in the politically all-important state).”

EC nonchalant

The EC, on its part, remains just as determined now as it was during the Bihar SIR to turn a Nelson’s Eye and a deaf ear to this wave of criticism and apprehensions. So much so that at his press conference, CEC Kumar stridently sidestepped all questions about any lessons the poll panel may have learnt from its Bihar experiment.

Instead, the CEC repeatedly hailed the Bihar SIR as a great success which concluded with “zero appeals” being filed by voters against the final rolls published on September 30. What Kumar left unsaid, for reasons too obvious, was that the final rolls would have by any estimation been vastly different – and truncated – had the Bihar SIR not been challenged by a litany of petitioners, Opposition parties included, in the Supreme Court forcing the poll panel to accept despite its stiff resistance Aadhaar as an additional proof of a voter’s legitimacy.

It may be recalled that the draft voter list published by the EC when its original deadline for the Bihar SIR ended had excluded 65 lakh voters from the state’s then voter count of 7.89 crore. It was only after the poll body was repeatedly pilloried in the Supreme Court by petitioners who challenged the exercise and directed by the judges to make amends that the final voter rolls saw some reinstatements; ending with the voter count pegged at 7.42 crore but without any clarifications from the EC on whether it had really reinstated at least some of those voters who had been wrongly excluded.

What did Bihar SIR achieve?

What the poll panel and its chief are yet to come clean on is whether the Bihar SIR accomplished weeding out “illegal migrants” from foreign nations – or ghuspaithiye, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi prefers to repeatedly call them – from the electoral rolls, given that this was among the key reasons cited for the revision to begin with. On Monday, Kumar ignored thrice questions by journalists who sought data on the number of illegal foreign nationals found during the Bihar exercise and wished to know if the upcoming SIR also aimed to identify and weed out such “voters”.

Also read: TMC warns EC against any attempt to ‘manipulate’ voter lists during SIR

Yet, without admitting its mistakes — deliberate or otherwise — the poll panel has tweaked the modalities for the pan-India SIR to some extent. Small mercies, perhaps. As such, the “list of indicative (not exhaustive) list” of documents now identified by the EC as those a voter may provide to prove her/his bona fides has included Aadhaar, at the outset, though the unique identity number will still not be accepted as a standalone document. Additionally, voters in any of the 12 jurisdictions up for the SIR roll-out who have parents or relatives (the latter is also a new addition) registered as voters in the new Bihar electoral rolls can provide “extract of the electoral rolls of Bihar SIR” to prove their own bona fides for voter registration.

A minor relaxation

There has also been a minor relaxation provided in the cut-off year for automatic reinstatement to the revised SIR. The Bihar SIR mandated that only those voters who had been registered on the electoral rolls during the 2003 Bihar SIR would automatically be reinstated in the revised 2025 rolls while those added after 2003 would need to provide afresh documents to prove their credentials.

The pan-India SIR now expands this timeline for automatic reinstatement to those registered as voters anytime between 2002 and 2005. Additionally, while voters added to the rolls after 2003 in Bihar had to provide either their name or their parents name to link and match with the revised rolls, the pan-India SIR states that this can now be done by electors even by providing their “relative’s name in last SIR held in 2002-2004”.

Thus, at least in theory, those who were either themselves on the 2002–04 rolls or whose parents/relatives were then registered as electors will not be required to furnish additional documentation during the upcoming exercise.

A major change

Another significant departure that the EC plans to make from the Bihar exercise is in allowing each booth level agent of different political parties to “collect duly filled in EFs (enumeration forms) from Electors, certify up to 50 EFs/Day and submit to BLO (booth level officers of the EC)” for addition to the revised voter lists.

Also read: EC to roll out SIR 2.0 in 12 states: Here are 12 things you need to know

The EC also claimed that the “List of Absent/Shifted/Death/Duplicate names not included in Draft Roll” will be published on the website of the chief election officer of each State/UT as well as at public offices, to aid those wrongly deleted to file appeals seeking reinstatement.

To what extent the poll panel eventually follows its own guidelines, of course, remains to be seen considering that at least some of these safeguards were supposed to be in place for the Bihar SIR too but never truly implemented.