The special intensive revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls appears to have neither impacted the poll outcome in seats where the highest deletions took place, nor turned the electorate against the NDA.
The Congress had organised a Vote Adhikar Yatra against the SIR during the “claims and objections” phase of the exercise, which verified voters’ citizenship and other eligibility credentials on the basis of specified documents.
The Magathbandhan had claimed that the drive — which trimmed 8.7 per cent of the voters from the rolls — was aimed at disenfranchising marginalised sections that vote for the Opposition alliance.
While political parties have set up assistance camps in states like Bengal where the SIR is now being held, in Bihar the Congress was busy with the Yatra when people were filing appeals.
Most of the claims and objections were filed by a smaller member of the Mahagathbandhan — the CPIML Liberation. The Congress and the RJD barely challenged the allegedly mala fide deletions they were campaigning against.
Patna, Madhubani and East Champaran were the districts with the highest deletions during the drive.
The eight seats in these districts that had individually witnessed the highest deletions were all held by the NDA, and have now been retained by the ruling alliance.
Madhubani and East Champaran border Nepal. Nepali members of several Indian families there have had their names deleted from the rolls, since voting rights are reserved for citizens.
Most of the seats along the border were held by the NDA, which has won them again.
The Election Commission has not revealed how many foreigners were discovered on the rolls.
One of the stated goals of the SIR was to weed illegal immigrants out of the electoral rolls. BJP politicians had repeatedly accused the Mahagathbandhan of protecting aliens, particularly in Seemanchal where Bihar’s Muslim population is concentrated.
In Kishanganj, the only Muslim-majority district in the state, the All India Majlis-e Ittehadul Muslimeen retained two seats, the Congress retained one, and the RJD lost a seat to the JDU.
Nor did the Mahagathbandhan make significant gains in the rest of the Seemanchal region, which had seen three big public meetings as part of the Vote Adhikar Yatra.
Two-time MLA and Congress legislature party leader Shakeel Ahmad Khan lost the Kadwa seat in Katihar to the JDU’s Dulal Chandra Goswami by 18,386 votes. Rahul Gandhi had addressed a rally during the Yatra in Kadwa, as had Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during the polls.
Rahul and Priyanka, the star Congress campaigners, had at their election rallies focused on alleging “vote chori” and a threat to the Constitution from the RSS and the BJP.
Tejashwi Yadav had stressed the local issues of every place he had spoken in. The RJD has done much better than the Congress.
On the burning issues of employment and corruption, the Mahagathbandhan had little to offer beyond the improbable-sounding promise of a government job for every family.
voters show the enumeration forms given by a Booth Level Officer (BLO) during the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar, in Vaishali district.
In Bahadurganj, where Rahul’s rally had attracted a huge crowd, many had begun to leave even while he was speaking. When asked, some of them said they had come just to see him and, having done so, had no reason to stay on.
Here too, “vote chori” failed to strike a chord. A minuscule number of appeals were filed against the draft list of the SIR.
In the border and Muslim-majority seats this newspaper toured, most voters had no problem getting included in the final rolls despite the glaring typos in demographic data that plague government documents in India.
Those who did not make it often directed their anger at the officials rather than the BJP-led government at the Centre. But people largely appreciated the effort put in by the booth-level officers, most of whom already enjoyed a high standing in their villages by virtue of being schoolteachers.
The Congress’s strike rate remained much lower than the RJD’s, repeating a trend seen in 2020.
Several Congress leaders blamed the Election Commission for their party’s poor showing.
“(The) Bihar results are disappointing, there is no doubt about it. The kind of atmosphere I saw there -- women were given ₹10,000 each; it was being given even when the election campaign was ongoing... EC remained a mute spectator,” former Rajasthan chief minister and the party’s observer for Bihar, Ashok Gehlot, told reporters in Jaipur.
“Why did it not stop this? It should have, but it didn’t.... This means that what Rahul Gandhi said for vote chori, this is what vote chori is. If fair elections are not held, if rigging takes place, if booth capturing takes place, or there is cheating and money is being distributed.... EC didn’t take any action, they were colluding with the ruling party.”
Rahul, in a message, said: “I express my heartfelt gratitude to those millions of voters in Bihar who expressed their trust in the Mahagathbandhan. This result in Bihar is truly surprising. We could not achieve victory in an election that was not fair from the very beginning.
“This fight is for the protection of the Constitution and democracy. The Congress Party and the INDIA alliance will review this result and strive to make our efforts to save democracy even more effective.”