The numbers in the voters’ list for the forthcoming assembly election in Bihar are out: and they do tell a tale. An estimated 7.42 crore voters have made it to the final list that was published on Tuesday; the figure is about 6% less than the number that was on the previous list on the day the Election Commission of India announced the implementation of a Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls for the state. Tellingly — this is a crucial inference — most of the deletions from the voters’ list have taken place on account of three principal factors: deaths, permanent migration and duplication — the primary reasons why electoral lists are pruned and updated periodically by the EC. This finding torpedoes the claims made by the EC and segments of the ruling political establishment that the SIR was necessary to purge the state’s electoral pool of foreign elements. Significantly, neither the chief election commissioner nor the state’s chief electoral officer has disclosed whether the presence of non-citizens was detected on the voters’ list in the course of the exercise. In other words, the EC’s alleged intention and its stout defence of the SIR as a means of establishing citizenship of voters have been thwarted.
This would not have been possible without the intervention of the Supreme Court. In the initial stages of the SIR, the EC, in a dubious move, broke with convention by passing the onus of eligibility for voting on to the people by directing them to produce a set of specific documents. This led to fears of disenfranchisement, especially of marginalised constituencies, since many members of such social groups did not possess or found it difficult to produce the necessary papers. This gave the Opposition the reason to dub the SIR in Bihar as an engagement designed in favour of exclusion. The highest court, responding to a clutch of legal petitions, nudged — not quite gently — the EC to relax the regulations. Its intervention that led to the EC accepting — grudgingly — the Aadhaar as the 12th document proved to be a crucial facilitator of electoral inclusion. Some states, including Bengal, are being prepared for an SIR; there is even a possibility of a national SIR being conducted in the near future. In some respects, Bihar has shown India how an SIR is not to be conducted. This is because inclusion, as opposed to the banishment of voters, should be the key goal of an SIR.