Opinion Yogendra Yadav writes: Bihar’s SIR exercise is a threat to right to vote — across India

Universal adult franchise was among the core principles of our freedom struggle, formulated in the Motilal Nehru Committee Report of 1928 and reiterated in the declaration of Purna Swaraj in 1929 and thereafter. The Constitution of India incorporated the principle of “adult suffrage” in Article 326 by stipulating that “every person who is a citizen of India and who is not less than twenty-one years of age … shall be entitled to be registered as a voter”. Article 5 specifies that Indian citizenship shall be based on birth and residence (not on descent or ethnicity etc). Article 10 protects a citizen against loss of citizenship status by providing for presumption of continuity: “Every person who is or is deemed to be a citizen of India” continues to be so.

In the first 75 years, the Republic of India followed the “logic of encompassment” in realising this constitutional promise. As Anupama Roy argues in her book Mapping Citizenship in India, the logic of encompassment involved a move towards true universalisation and recognition of all differences so as to extend citizenship status to everyone. There was also, no doubt, the contrary “logic of closure” at work — of denial, suspicion and exclusion — especially against migrant workers, who continued to be “residual citizens”. But that logic was never extended to the denial of voting rights. Hence the now-accepted argument in the book Why India Votes? by anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee: The secular ritual of voting has acquired something of a sacrosanct status in India.

This did not happen by accident. The logic of encompassment was embodied in laws, rules and institutional practices, all aimed at ensuring that no voter was left behind. First, unlike the US and other countries that require every eligible person to apply to register as a voter, the Indian system placed the responsibility of enrolling each eligible voter on the state. The result: only 74 per cent of adults made it to the voters’ list in the US, while it was 96 per cent in India. While individuals can apply for inclusion in the electoral roll, the principal responsibility lies with election officials (now the BLO and the ERO) to contact every adult resident and make sure that no eligible voter is left behind. Second, there is a presumption of citizenship: Every person who appears to be an adult and resides in the locality is presumed to be a citizen and put on the electoral roll unless there are good grounds to suspect otherwise or there is a complaint. Once on the voters’ list, a name cannot be removed without the proper process. Finally, as Ornit Shani’s celebrated history How India Became Democratic shows, the making of universal franchise required the ECI to take unusual steps. Over the years, the ECI has gone out of its way to evolve protocols for the inclusion of “liminal” citizens who may have been left out in any routine, bureaucratic exercise: Nomadic communities, homeless persons, sex workers, transgender persons, orphans, undocumented citizens and non-resident Indians.

The SIR seeks to reverse the logic of encompassment. It seeks to formalise the logic of closure that would result in graded inequality of citizenship. For the first 75 years, the Indian state failed to convert the promise of “free and equal membership of a political community” — to recall the favourite words of T H Marshall — from the formal political sphere to a substantive social sphere. As Niraja Gopal Jayal has argued so perceptively in Citizenship Imperilled: India’s Fragile Democracy, we are witnessing “major reconfigurations of citizenship” that would result in “not the realisation of substantive citizenship but in fact a substantive erosion of even formal citizenship”.

The current exercise completes this reversal through multiple, simultaneous moves under the innocuous neologism of “Special Intensive Revision” of electoral rolls. While it pretends to implement Article 326 of the Constitution, it twists the constitutional intent by disregarding the presumption of continuing citizenship. It is another subtle step in what Jayal identifies as the transition from the jus soli principle of citizenship based on birth and residence to the jus sanguinis principle of citizenship based on descent, ethnicity or religion.

The SIR reverses the practices that have ensured the operationalisation of universal adult franchise in India. First, the onus of being on the voters’ list has been shifted to the eligible voters. For the first time, all potential voters, with no exception, have been asked to fill out an enumeration form. Otherwise, they don’t even figure on the draft electoral rolls. Their being on the voters’ list so far is of no consequence, unless they figured on the electoral rolls of 2003. (There is nothing to justify 2003 as a cut-off point, as that exercise did not involve any physical or documentary verification of citizenship status). Second, the presumption of citizenship has been overturned. Now you need to prove that you are not an illegal resident. For the first time, everyone carries the burden of offering documents (either a copy of the 2003 voters’ list or proof of birth and residence) that have never been provided to them, and that a majority has no reason to possess. Finally, it seeks to legalise arbitrariness through the absurd provision of an “indicative (though not exhaustive)” list of documents, which can be changed at the discretion of any local official.

In the past few days, the media has finally taken note of the chaos, the tragedy and the farce that the SIR is unfolding in Bihar. Powerful and relevant as these stories are, they must not distract us from the basic design underlying the exercise. The real problem is not just inefficiency and unfairness in operationalising the SIR. The very scheme is malevolent, anti-constitutional and anti-democratic. It must be scrapped.

The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. He has filed a petition in the Supreme Court challenging the SIR