A pet BJP theme in the Bihar Assembly elections scheduled for next month is the alleged infiltration of outsiders – read Bangladeshis – in the state known for an exodus of people to other states in search of livelihood.
From Khagaria to Begusarai, over four days, Union home minister Amit Shah, responsible for keeping India’s borders safe, has repeatedly spoken about cleansing the Bihar electoral rolls of infiltrators.
“Should the names of Bangladeshi infiltrators remain in Bihar’s electoral rolls? Lalu (former chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav), Rahul (Rahul Gandhi, the Lok Sabha’s leader of Opposition) are protectors of infiltrators. The BJP government will not allow any infiltrators in Bihar,” Shah told BJP supporters in Begusarai.
Amit Shah. PTI picture
Four days ago in Khagaria, he had said: “Every infiltrator would be detected, deleted and deported.”
In Siwan, he asked the crowd: “Should infiltrators remain on the voter list?” The crowd said: “No.”
He is right. Foreigners should not be allowed to vote and should not remain on voter lists. However, the Election Commission of India is tight-lipped on exactly how many foreigners it has found after the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar.
The poll panel has so far not provided details of the foreigners detected during the exercise, which happened to be the prime reason behind the decision to carry out the drive.
Questions raised by the opposition parties and activists directly to the EC and even before the Supreme Court have not been answered yet.
When the media asked the EC about the foreigners detected in Bihar, they were told the data are with the district electoral officers. A list of the names deleted from the voters list was provided to the political parties, without the reasons behind the deletion.
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On Tuesday evening, at a media conclave, Shah claimed: “Names of many people have been deleted [after the SIR]. These names were deleted because they could not prove they are Indian citizens. If they were Indian citizens their names would not have been removed. We don’t have a problem. We can give the papers. Only three appeals have been made against the deletions which means the rest were foreigners.”
On the conclusion of the SIR in neighbouring Bihar, names of 68.66 lakh voters were deleted from the 7.89 crore on June 25 when SIR was declared. After the addition of 21.53 lakh voters, the final electoral roll in Bihar is 7.42 crore.
Activist Yogendra Yadav had posed the same question to the EC’s counsel at the Supreme Court during a hearing earlier this month.
“The focus on foreigners was so intense that anyone could have lodged a complaint. Of the 7.4 crore electorate [before the SIR] only 1,087 complaints were received, of which 390 were accepted. We do not know how many of these complaints were about foreigners,” Yadav said in a post on his X handle.
“Only these 390 could have been identified as foreigners and removed from the voters list. In the meantime, 796 people filed affidavits, saying they were not Indian nationals.”
Yadav, Bengal Congress leader Prasenjit Bose and others have pointed out that when the EC’s last special intensive revision was carried out across the country between the years 2002 and 2004, no check for citizenship was made, no enumeration forms were distributed, no documents asked for.
After chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar announced the SIR for 12 states including the poll-bound states of Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry excluding Assam from the exercise, Yadav had again asked the EC if exclusion of illegal foreigners continues to be one of the objectives of the SIR.
“If so, how many foreigners were detected and deleted from the electoral rolls in Bihar? The SIR order mentioned this as an objective but no data has been given thereafter,” Yadav said.
The logical step after deletion, as spelt out by Shah himself, would have been deportation following due process that includes filing an FIR. No reports of deportation have come so far.