The Election Commission’s decision to conduct a special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar has drawn allegations of an “NRC-like exercise” that can lead to “large-scale disenfranchisement”.
Dipankar Bhattacharya, general secretary of the CPIML-Liberation, in a letter to chief election commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, said: “In terms of its scale and nature, this special intensive revision will be akin to the NRC exercise in Assam. In Assam, it took six years for the government to complete the exercise and even then the Assam government is not ready to accept the NRC as the final list of citizens.”
As many as 40 lakh people were excluded from the initial draft of the NRC in Assam in 2018. The number dropped to around 10,000 following appeals and verifications.
Former Trinamool MP Jawhar Sircar posted on X: “Draconian decision by Election Commission to hack out minority and non-BJP voters — by saying you don’t have Citizenship document!... ECI is now Modi’s 3rd agency, after CBI & ED.”
The EC has listed “rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, non-reporting of deaths and inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” as reasons for conducting the SIR. The last such exercise for Bihar happened in 2003.
The EC has mandated different levels of document verification based on the Citizenship Act, 1955. Booth-level officers (BLOs) will hand over pre-filled enumeration forms to voters who must fill up the additional details, sign and return them with relevant proofs of date and place of birth. ID proofs of either or both parents are needed if the voter was born after July 1, 1987.
Former CEC O.P. Rawat said: “Around 80 to 90 per cent of people will be covered by the rolls of 2003 and won’t require additional proof. The remaining 10 per cent who may have shifted addresses since then will require proof. A minuscule 2-3 per cent may not have required documents. This will include illegal immigrants as well as genuine voters, and BLOs will have to focus only on this group.”