NEW DELHI — Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar on Tuesday said the Election Commission should not start an NRC exercise in the name of electoral rolls revision and asserted the process must not be about verifying citizenship as that is the Home Ministry’s job.
The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar shows that the poll body does accept what Rahul Gandhi and the Congress have been saying that there is a problem with the electoral rolls, he said, reported PTI.
“If Rahul Gandhi is right, then the EC should give the Congress the data it has been asking for. First, they should accept this and then adopt the right method to rectify it,” Kumar told reporters when asked about SIR in Bihar during a press conference at Indira Bhawan here.
“If they have to revise, it should be done with transparency and given proper time. What would be done in three months? It should be given 13 months or over three years… They should revise electoral rolls and not ask for proof of citizenship, that is the job of the home ministry,” the Congress leader from Bihar said.
“In the name of revision of electoral rolls, they should not start the National Register of Citizens (NRC). That is the job of the home ministry.”
If the EC is accepting that there is an issue with the electoral rolls, then it must rectify that but give it proper time, he said, adding booth-level officers are asking on camera, how can this be done in a short span of time.
“Any document issued by the government should be acceptable. You are asking for a birth certificate; how many people in Bihar would have that? Not just that, they are asking for the birth certificate of the parents,” Kumar said.
He claimed that most people in Bihar have two birthdays — one is official and the other randomly assigned in the Class 10 certificates, as not many have birth certificates.
Asked about field-level functionaries of the Election Commission having found “a large number of people” from Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar during house-to-house visits made for the ongoing intensive review of the voters’ list in Bihar, Kumar said if this news is correct then it must be answered who is accountable for this — “it is the home minister”.
“If this is true, then the elections in which the BJP has won, they did it with the votes of people from Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal. Those elections should be declared null and void.”
Kumar’s remarks come days after the Supreme Court asked the Election Commission to consider Aadhaar, Voter ID and ration cards as valid documents during SIR in Bihar, set to go to polls later this year.
Calling SIR a “constitutional mandate”, Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi had considered the submissions of senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi, appearing for the EC, and permitted the poll panel to continue with the exercise in Bihar with over seven crore voters.
Terming the right to vote as an important right in a democratic country, it had said, “We cannot stop a constitutional body from doing what it is supposed to do. Simultaneously, we will not let them do what they are not supposed to do.”
