Opinion Yogendra Yadav writes | SIR questions, beyond Aadhaar: The Election Commission is ignoring its own rules

The written order and the unwritten practice of SIR violate the ECI’s own Manual at every step. The foundational violation was the SIR order itself. A bolt from the blue, this order of June 24 invented a new type of revision called “Special Intensive Revision” that did not exist in law. Taking cover behind an exceptional provision [Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950] that has been invoked only once to rewrite the voters’ list in the Thakurdwara assembly segment of UP in 2003, the ECI unrolled a new kind of nationwide rewriting of electoral rolls.

The useful exercise of “Intensive Revision” was now armed with two weapons of disenfranchisement. One, each potential voter was required to submit an Enumeration Form or face deletion from the draft list. This Form or the requirement for such a form did not exist in law. Two, each elector was asked to provide evidence of citizenship from a list of documents, although the ECI did not possess the power to carry out any such verification, and the apex court orders in the Lal Babu Hussein case barred the ECI from doing so. Not just that, the ECI invented a new list of 11 documents by junking its existing list of documents of high evidentiary value and coverage in favour of documents of dubious evidentiary value and negligible coverage. The exemption provided to those on the voters list in 2003 also did not enjoy any legal basis, as that revision had nothing to distinguish it from other revisions before or after 2003.

Further violations followed once the SIR was rolled out in practice. Let us note here some of the most egregious lapses from the ECI’s meticulous Manual.

The exclusion of over 65 lakh voters in the earlier list should have triggered multiple provisions of the Manual that ask the officials to pay very special attention to any significant deletion. All polling stations “where number of deletions exceeds 2 per cent of the total electors” must be cross-verified personally by ERO (Manual, Para 11.4.5). If the ECI had taken this mandate seriously, it would have had to order verification of over 93 per cent of all booths in the state, 84,675 booths to be precise. Besides, all EROs have been mandated to check booths with high additions or deletions (Para 11.4.3). That would have required checking of the 1,988 booths where more than 200 previous voters were deleted. There is no public record that any ERO carried out any such verification.

The publication of draft electoral rolls invites another set of red flags from the Manual that the ECI seems to have disregarded. The Manual (Para 11.4.3) instructs each ERO to personally and physically verify households with 10 or more electors. If the ECI had followed its own instructions, it would have had to visit 16.9 lakh households (excluding houses marked “0”) in Bihar and double-check nearly 2.78 crore voters who live in such houses, some of which shelter more than 800 voters each. The ECI also turned a blind eye to its mandate (Para 11.4.3) of cross-verification of booths with “abnormal gender ratio”. There are 29,509 booths where women accounted for more than 60 per cent of the total deletions. In the draft electoral rolls, 13,006 booths show a significantly lower (over 1 standard deviation) from the average gender ratio, and 2,023 booths fall in the highly abnormal (2 standard deviations or more) category.

Let us turn to the next phase of “claims and objections”. The Manual mandates a very high degree of transparency: Every single claim of inclusion and exclusion must be published on the CEO’s website on a daily basis. Not just that, “the web application used for this purpose should also provide a facility that, on clicking on any row in the list, the concerned application form can be printed by any citizen” (Para 11.3.4). Besides, a list of all claims and objections should be personally handed over by the ERO to representatives of all political parties at the end of every week (Para 11.3.5).

Eight weeks since these provisions kicked in, the ECI has not fulfilled any of these requirements. As of September 14, a fortnight after the deadline for claims and objections, the website of the CEO of Bihar had uploaded only 51 per cent of the records of objections and 39 per cent of the records of new claims. The mandate of allowing the downloading of each form was not followed in a single case. In most cases, the EROs have not held weekly meetings with political parties, let alone hand over the list to them. The three leading opposition parties have written to the ECI pointing out these violations, but to no avail. As per the ECI’s own norms [Para 11.3.6 (iii) of Manual], no claim or objection can be disposed of until one week after the publication of these lists in the prescribed format. Yet, the ECI proudly announced that it disposed of more than 1.3 lakh applications by September 1 without following this mandate.

Finally, let us note the ongoing exercise of notices being issued to “ineligible electors” for deficiencies in their documentation. Media speculation abounds as no one quite knows how many notices have been issued, to whom and where. This again violates the mandate of strict transparency in Rule 21 A(b) of The Registration of Electors Rules, 1960, which requires every such notice to be displayed on notice board.

These are not just legalistic issues of formal procedures. An analysis of the data on claims and objections uploaded so far confirms the apprehension that these transgressions could hide very substantial acts of mischief. Among the applicants who have filed claims for being a new voter, only 27 per cent belong to the relevant age group of 18-20 years. As many as 41 per cent are older than 25 years and there are 65 applicants who are 100 years or above! Among the objections, as many as 57 per cent are self-objections: the person who filled an Enumeration Form a month ago has objected to his or her own name. More than 500 persons have done so on the ground that they themselves are foreigners! Not to put too fine a point on it, something is fishy here.

All this raises some basic questions: Why is this exercise being carried out in a shroud of secrecy, disregarding the well-laid norms that have evolved over the years? Will the apex court allow this to be repeated in the rest of the country? The nation wants to know.

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