Media365
On the rainy morning of September 5, with umbrellas in one hand and clutching every card they had in another, harried residents of Mangolpuri, Delhi, lined up at a jan sunwai (public hearing) to file claims and objections about being wrongfully excluded from the draft Special Intensive Revision (SIR) voters list.
Four days earlier, voters across Delhi had received a shock when the draft SIR list had been published, with over a third of their names (over 47 lakh) “deleted”, marked “absent, permanently shifted, dead, or duplicate” (ASDD). An additional 11 lakh voters had been dropped from the voter list altogether, and 32 lakh were to receive notices, thus amounting to the staggering figure of one in two voters in Delhi trying to get their names back onto the voter list. In a resettlement colony like Mangolpuri, this was a cause of extreme insecurity.
As part of a planned demonstrative response, a public audit was carried out by civil society groups in one block (polling station) of Mangolpuri. The aim was to have a people’s audit of the SIR. But it was also to demonstrate how the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) assurance that “No eligible voter to be left out, while no ineligible voter to be included in the Electoral Roll” could be safeguarded.
The public audit made it clear that the ECI and the CEO Delhi are broadcasting an empty slogan. The process they have adopted is so questionable that one can safely say universal adult franchise has been severely undermined. In fact, it has been replaced with an arbitrary deletion process.
The SIR is estimated to exclude at least 10 crore eligible voters. The voter list is the bread and butter of every political party, and they should individually and collectively be mobilising people to protect their right to vote.
Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar recently certified the SIR process, claiming that “zero appeals have been filed against deletions in 12 states where the SIR has been completed”. The testimonies at the Mangolpuri Jan Sunwai not only showed how wrong the ECI is in evaluating the SIR, but also why it is a process that is flawed in design. There are at least six clear lessons that emerge out of the public audit:
One, no matter what orders are passed, it is an almost impossible task for the Booth Level Officer (BLO) to complete the mandated three visits to every house. In fact, many houses were not visited even once. Where the BLO is exhausted or insensitive, the situation is much worse.
Two, the de novo filling of enumeration forms by all voters shifts the burden of voter registration from the Election Commission to the voter. This is unprecedented, unwarranted, and is bound to result in mass exclusions. In 2002, the BLOs followed an SOP where they used the previously frozen voters list to go house to house and verify additions and deletions. That is a far more sensible way to update and verify the list. People displaying their voter IDs at the Jan Sunwai could not comprehend why their EPIC cards were now invalid, and they needed to register afresh to have a right to vote.
Three, the requirement of proving citizenship by mapping yourself or your direct lineage on the 2002 voters list has proved to be a nightmare, especially for migrant workers and women who have shifted due to marriage.
Four, the so-called logical discrepancies have imposed a tyranny and illogic of amplifying wrong data entries made over the years. Once again, the burden of correcting wrongly entered data falls on the citizen.
Five, the overwhelming lesson from Mangolpuri is that this flawed and arbitrary SIR system must go. The appeal and grievance redress process also lies with the same machinery that is implementing this impossible exercise.
Six, until such time as better sense prevails, the provisions in the election manual incorporating a public hearing at the panchayat, ward or booth level before any name is deleted or added, must be implemented in letter and spirit. This is to ensure that any omissions or commissions are brought out and remedial action is initiated.
The public audit process carried out in Mangolpuri did not just identify and authentically prove the shortcomings and incorrect exclusions in the SIR process, but also demonstrated it as an efficacious method to actually update and revise the electoral roll. Unfortunately, this process has been almost entirely ignored by the ECI. CEOs of three states — Karnataka, Telangana and Jharkhand — have issued perfunctory orders that can never be carried out in the one day they have allocated for this purpose.
The audit showed wrongful deletions in all the ASDD categories. Some of the anomalies were especially ironic. In 95 houses, one of the spouses had been marked as shifted while the other remained on the SIR list. In one case, a man called Kanta Prasad had been marked dead, and he came to the microphone asking what he could do to come alive. It would have been funny had it not been so tragic.
Finally, two days after the Jan Sunwai, the CEO’s office decided to respond through a press note and stood by their wrongful deletions in all six cases they addressed. For instance, the note stated, “In the case of Kanta Prasad, the elector was included in the ASDD list (under dead category) on the basis of information furnished by his family member, namely Shivanshu. Thus, the categorisation (as dead) was supported by field-level information recorded by BLO and was not made without any underlying verification/input.”
Shivanshu is Kanta Prasad’s son. He has recorded a statement that he was tricked into signing a blank sheet of paper under the pretext of restoring his father’s name. It is shocking that a callous act by a BLO becomes part of a cover-up exercise that leads all the way up to the CEO’s office. Instead of redress and accountability for incorrect deletions, the ECI requires all wrongly deleted voters to come back to the voter list by filling Form 6 (the form for new voters), where the voter is forced to sign a false declaration that they are “applying for inclusion in the electoral roll for the first time”.
Instead of defending the indefensible, it would be prudent for the ECI to scrap this SIR process altogether. A robust public audit process would be a far more effective Special Intensive Revision. Even if the SIR is not scrapped, all its additions and deletions should go through a public audit process across the country. Bringing it into effect as a safeguard against arbitrary deletions and exclusions in Delhi would be a good place to start.
Dey is a social activist and is working with the MKSS and Jan Sarokar. Ray is with the National Federation of Indian Women and Jan Sarokar
