The madness now has a method. The second, nationwide, edition of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls is no longer a knee-jerk solution in search of a problem, an afterthought in search of a rationale, a man-made disaster constantly in need of a coverup. The SIR has seen improvements. A crude instrument of indiscriminate mass disenfranchisement has now been refined into a precision weapon for targeted exclusion.
The latest announcement shows the ECI’s inability, or rather unwillingness, to learn from the experiment carried out in Bihar. As reported in this column (IE, October 7), instead of a quantum jump in the quality of electoral rolls, the SIR has resulted in a worsening in all key respects: A sharp decline in the adult-elector ratio, disproportionate deletions of women and Muslims, and continued presence of glaring inaccuracies (duplicate names, junk entries, bulk voters under one address, etc.) in the voters’ list. Add to it the monetary cost to the state, political upheaval before the elections and the untold physical and psychological cost to poor citizens, and you can see why Bihar was a textbook model of how not to carry out a revision of electoral rolls.
The lessons were there for everyone to see. One, our electoral rolls are seriously defective. Two, the routine exercise of summary revision leaves in too many dead and absent persons and leaves out too many eligible new voters. Three, physical verification through house-to-house visits was, therefore, long overdue. Four, getting each person to fill in the enumeration form within one month, or else lose their voting rights, was unnecessary and exclusionary. Five, the whole charade of connecting voters to the supposedly pristine voters’ list of 2003 had nothing to do with improving the quality of the voters’ list. Six, the new list of eligibility documents was exclusionary and impossible to implement. And seven, there is no evidence whatsoever of foreigners on the pre-existing voters’ list.
So, if Bihar was a pilot case for the SIR, it should have led to a serious rethink about the wisdom of such an exercise. Instead of the SIR, the ECI could have carried out an old-style intensive revision — house-to-house physical verification — backed by sophisticated IT solutions to weed out any inaccuracies. It could have junked the cumbersome requirement of enumeration forms, expanded the restrictive list of eligibility documents and done without the hair-brained mapping of each elector to someone on the 2003 list. The ECI has chosen not to take this eminently sane and simple route. The CEC’s strange denial of a need for de-duplication software — weird coming from an IIT Kanpur alumnus — confirms the suspicion that “purification” of electoral rolls is not what the ECI is interested in.
The improvements in the new version of the SIR are all about more efficient administration of an inherently malevolent scheme. The ECI is surely better prepared this time than it was in Bihar. Timely training of election officials and advanced mapping of names to older voters’ lists would ensure less chaos. Allowing party booth-level agents (BLAs) to submit forms would reduce the burden on the official booth-level officers (BLOs). The ECI has now formalised the post-hoc and surreptitious concessions that it made in Bihar. Electors will not need to submit any documents along with their enumeration forms. The exemption from showing documents has now officially been extended not just to children but also any “relative” (undefined so far) of anyone who features on the older electoral rolls of 2002-04. Allowing any adult family member to sign and submit enumeration forms on behalf of someone temporarily away would be a relief for many seasonal migrants. Asking every BLO to carry forms for new voters should ensure that there are substantial additions and not just deletions in the house-to-house phase of the SIR. All this would make the process less painful for voters and less of a nightmare for election officials.
Yet, these concessions and improvements do not change the basic exclusionary design of the SIR. The ECI has decided to persist with a lie that the present exercise is a repetition of the intensive revision that has been carried out eight times in the past. Now that the older guidelines are in the public domain, despite the ECI’s attempt to withhold the document, we know that the present SIR is unlike any other intensive revision in the past.
Above all, the new SIR continues to shift the burden of being on the voters’ list onto the voters themselves, a fundamental shift in the architecture of universal adult franchise in our country. This comes with a draconian provision, not amended in the new edition, that anyone who fails to submit the form within a month will be summarily excluded from the voters’ list, with no notice, hearing or appeal. Global experiments show that any shift from state-initiated registration of voters to self-initiated registration leads to a significant drop in the electoral rolls. This structural impediment could lead to the exclusion of anything between 5 and 10 per cent of eligible electors from the rolls. This would include a disproportionate number of women, as was the case in Bihar. The ECI has not bothered to attend to this real danger.
Add to it the mechanism of targeted deletions that has been sharpened in the new version. The ECI has persisted with the fiction that the citizenship of those who featured on the electoral rolls in 2002-04 has been tested, though the guidelines of that time clearly show that it was not. Unlike Bihar, now everyone will have to go through the filter and prove that they or their relatives existed on the 2002-04 rolls. And if they don’t, they receive a notice to show documents, the same old restrictive list with a grudging and qualified mention of Aadhaar. Plus, all of them would be asked to prove why they cannot show any family member on the rolls in 2002-04. This sounds very much like Assam’s NRC. Since the ECI has not developed any transparent protocol of how the SDMs will
verify the documents, there is a valid apprehension of arbitrary deletion, or targeted deletion of individuals of communities that are inconvenient to the ruling dispensation. In that sense, the second round of the SIR is more directly a citizenship verification exercise.
Clearly, Bihar was a test case, not to check whether the SIR was the right medicine for the disease afflicting our electoral rolls but to check how best to administer a pre-decided medicine of dubious efficacy.
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan
