Eleven INDIA parties met the Election Commission over the special intensive revision of the Bihar electoral rolls on Wednesday “under protest” after the poll panel said it would entertain requests only from party heads and allow only two representatives per party.
After the meeting, Congress MP Abhishek Manu Singhvi told reporters: “We have gone in under protest, signed (the register) under protest. What was communicated to us in the last few days is that only the heads of parties can attend. This is unheard of, unthinkable. It will render the dialogue between political parties and the EC impossible. Nor (is it) feasible.”
“We believe this is a pedantic and sterile insistence on two persons per party. This has no legal basis. My senior colleagues Jairam Ramesh, Pawan Khera, Akhileshji (Akhilesh Prasad Singh) from Bihar — and we were talking about Bihar — sat out for three hours. The SIR that was held in 2003 was held one year before the Lok Sabha elections,” he added.
Singhvi said he was not against the SIR but did not want it to be rushed just before the polls. “This disenfranchisement and disempowerment is the worst attack on the basic structure of the Constitution. How do you expect a diverse profile of Bihar’s voting population — the backward, the flood-affected, the impoverished, the SC/STs or even the migrants — to spend the next two months running around to get their own or their parents’ birth certificates?” Singhvi said.
He expressed fear that around a quarter of Bihar’s voters could be disenfranchised and asked if the EC considered all polls held in the state since 2003 as fraudulent.
RJD MP Manoj Jha claimed that the EC said 20 per cent of Bihar residents who migrated “would be targeted to be excluded”. “Most people do not have those 11 documents (to prove their identity). If your intention is to exclude crores of people, then this won’t stop here. The tide will hit the streets,” he said.
The EC posted on X: “Some of the participants were given an appointment and others were allowed to join in without any prior appointment as the Commission decided to meet two representatives from every party so as to listen to all views.”