Twenty-four Opposition parties and Independent MP Kapil Sibal have requested the Chief Justice of India to suspend the ongoing SIR in several states, accusing the Election Commission of “partisan” behaviour and asking “who do we turn to” if the courts don’t provide succour.
They have asserted that the recent Bengal Assembly polls were held under a siege, with a massive deployment of central forces, and highlighted poll panel actions that allegedly targeted the Trinamool Congress and rendered the election process “partisan… and consequently suspect”.
Alleging that several recent state elections were “manipulated”, the letter expresses suspicion about the electronic voting machines, and questions the way returning officers were appointed and the counting centres managed.
It says that in future, an SIR should be a door-to-door exercise and be started in a state at least five years before an Assembly election.
The letter — on the joint letterhead of the leaders of the Opposition in both Houses of Parliament, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi — was sent on Sunday and its contents were made public on Friday.
It has been signed by all 22 INDIA constituents and Sibal, who attended last month’s meeting of the grouping here, as well as former allies Aam Aadmi Party and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.
It begins with a disclaimer, saying: “It is not addressed to, nor intended for, any Judge who is or may hereafter be seized of any of the matters referred to herein, and nothing we say is meant to influence the decision of any cause pending before any court.
“Our sole purpose is to strengthen, and never to weaken, public confidence in the institutions of our democracy, and to place our concerns, in good faith, before the forum where the citizens of India have always reposed their final trust.”
The letter refers to a 2023 Supreme Court order that said election commissioners must be appointed by a committee of the Prime Minister, Lok Sabha Opposition leader and the CJI. It says the order came in the context of post-2014 appointees being “seen to be doing the bidding of the government, brazenly, to manipulate the outcome of election results”.
(The government replaced the CJI on the committee with a Union minister through an enactment, a challenge to which is pending before the apex court.)
Roll revision doubts
“The political rhetoric seeking to rationalise this process (SIR) centred around the alleged infiltration of Bangladeshis into the Bihar electoral rolls,” the letter says.
“Now that the Bihar Assembly elections are over, there is absolutely no data to suggest that such an infiltration indeed took place nor has the Election Commission made public any data with respect to the number of Bangladeshis having illegally acquired the right to vote in India.”
The letter adds: “The documentation process, adopted for the first time, was inherently exclusionary and politically motivated. Verification of voters based on filling forms and production of documents, questioning citizenship, left voters disenfranchised….
“There were instances, that the Commission was aware of, where videos circulating on the social media showed booth-level officers themselves filling the forms by forging signatures, and in some instances, uploading these forms without the consent of the voters. Even deceased persons were shown to be submitting forms.”
Besides, the rules were changed several times during the SIR process, the letter goes on to say.
“Even in 2014, the then updated electoral rolls (under a UPA government) reflected an outcome that none questioned. The whole process of (the latest rounds of) the SIR, according to us, was meant to favour the BJP,” it says.
It adds: “We believe that recently conducted elections in Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra were also manipulated….
“In light of what we have stated, we do expect the impending SIR process be suspended and be launched at a time when the next Assembly election is at least five years away so that representatives of the Commission can go to each house for verification of voters, instead of a process of documentation which has never been adopted in the past.”
The SIR is currently under way in nine states and one Union Territory, and is to begin in seven more states and two UTs in October.
Bengal
On Bengal, the letter says: “It was apparent that the West Bengal Government was under siege with the presence of 2 lakh 40 thousand CAPF personnel. To put this in context, 3 lakh 50 thousand CAPF personnel were deployed for the entire Lok Sabha election in 2024….”
It underlines that the tribunals hearing appeals against the SIR exclusions in Bengal have found an overwhelmingly majority of the deletions to be incorrect.
“One of the 19 Tribunals hearing the appeals, (the one) headed by Justice T.S. Sivagnanam, found that of the 1,777 names deleted for which appeals were heard by him, 1,717 were wrongly deleted,” the letter says.
“Most of the deletions were found to be in constituencies where the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) was dominant…. Massive deletions, non-transparent processes, the unprecedented numbers of CAPF personnel deployed, the nomination of two representatives of the Union government of their choice and the Returning Officer chosen by the blatantly biased Commission at the counting centres, with no nominee of the AITC, made for a partisan process and consequently suspect.”
Trinamool has already flagged the choice of the returning officers and alleged mismanagement of the counting centres, particularly in Mamata Banerjee’s seat of Bhabanipur.
The letter also underlines the large-scale transfer of officials in Bengal.
Model code
“The Commission has not been even-handed by choosing not to take action when the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) is breached by the political party in power — all this while targeting those in the opposition,” the letter says.
“On multiple occasions, the Commission had maintained a stoic silence when openly toxic, communal statements contrary to the principles enunciated in the MCC are routinely made by those in the BJP….”
The alleged misuse of investigative agencies to destabilise governments too finds a mention in the six-page letter, which ends with an appeal.
“Judges do not live in ivory towers. You too are aware of what is happening on the ground…,” it says.
“We are not questioning the judiciary. In fact, we turn to the courts when every mechanism fails. When this too fails, it leaves open the question — who do we now turn to?”
The signatories include former chief ministers Akhilesh Yadav, Mamata, Farooq Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti and Uddhav Thackeray.