Yogendra Yadav says SIR has now been refined into a targeted weapon of exclusion, and poses 14 questions to the Election Commission of India.
Yogendra Yadav
FIRST versions of SIR caused massive confusion and upheaval, including to the supporters of the ruling dispensation. The new version of SIR makes life easy for the EC and its officials and to some extent for the voters. But SIR retains its basic exclusionary character. It is not as a measure to purify the electoral rolls but a mechanism for selective and arbitrary disenfranchisement and an exercise in verification of citizenship, an NRC by another name.
Here are some minor improvements:
1. The EC is better prepared than it was in Bihar: training of BLOs and advanced mapping of names to 2002-04 voters lists
2. Documentary burden has been reduced: Exemption has now officially been extended to any relative of someone who figured on 2002-04 rolls, not just to parents; no documents to be submitted in the enumeration phase, needed only when a notice is given
3. More disclosures: list of excluded names will be published by the ECI
4. Political party BLAs have been allowed to submit 50 Enumeration Forms a day
But the basic problems with SIR still remain:
1. The burden of being on the electoral rolls is still on the elector; the unprecedented requirement of filling Enumeration Form still remains
2. Anyone who fails to submit the form within a month will be summarily excluded, with no notice, no hearing, no appeal.
3. The arbitrary cutoff of 2002-04 still continues despite the expose of the earlier order that proves that citizenship was not checked then
4. No change in the list of documents: no PAN, Driving License, Ration Card, MNREGA Job Card. ECI continues to be reluctance to accept SC order on Aadhar as 12th document.
5. The process of verification of documents remains arbitrary
6. Greater focus that earlier on SIR as a measure to verify citizenship
7. Repeated claim of SIR as instrument of identifying illegal foreigners without any data
8. No plan for removal of inaccuracies: no de-duplication, no checking for junk data, no physical verification to meet ECI’s own manual
9. No attempt to address disproportionate exclusion of migrants and women
10. No explanation of why such a cumbersome and exclusionary method has been chosen when the ECI has better schemes like NREP for cleaning up of electoral rolls
Here are 14 questions that the ECI must answer:
1. What has the ECI learnt from the experience of SIR in Bihar? What are the modifications in the original SIR order in the light of these learning’s?
2. On what basis does the ECI treat 2002/2003 as the cutoff year, now that we know that no verification of citizenship took place during the intensive revision in that year? (The 2002 Guidelines, withheld from the public by the ECI, clearly show that there was no enumeration form, no documents were asked and verification of citizenship was prohibited then)
3. Does the exclusion of illegal foreigners continue to be one of the objectives of SIR? If so, how many foreigners were detected and deleted from the electoral rolls in Bihar? (The SIR order mentioned this as an objective but no data has been given thereafter)
4. If Aadhar is not accepted as stand-along document since it is not a proof of citizenship, why are 9 other documents (all except Passport and Birth certificate) accepted as stand along documents, since none of them is a proof of citizenship?
5. Who exactly gets the exemption on the basis of having their name in the electoral rolls of 2002/2003 ? They themselves, their children or anyone related to them? (The ECI has changed its position several times, without any amendment to the original SIR order which limited the exemption to the person. IN Bihar Vanshavali was used to extent the exemption to anyone related to that person.
6. Has the ECI changed it house to house visit protocol to allow for addition of new voters in the Draft Electoral Rolls? (Not a single new voters was added in Bihar till the publication of draft rolls on 1 August, while 65 lakh voters were excluded. Addition happened only during the claim and objection phase)
7. How would the ECI ensure an acknowledgement to everyone who submits an Enumeration Forms or a document? (In Bihar hardly anyone got acknowledgement despite clear provision for it in the SIR order)
8. Did the ECI come across any case of forgery by the BLO or others in filling Enumeration Forms on behalf of someone else, without their knowledge or consent? How is that to be prevented? (There were widespread reports of BLOs filling Enumeration Forms to meet targets)
9. Has the ECI thought of any special arrangement to ensure that migrant workers are not left out of the draft electoral rolls? (Widespread reports of hardship and exclusion faced by seasonal migrants and their inability to use ECI App).
10. What steps has the ECI taken to ensure that SIR does not lead to a fall in the gender ratio in the electoral rolls, as it did in Bihar? (The ECI affidavit in the Supreme Court admits the veracity of this data)
11. Does the ECI plan to offer those excluded from the Draft Electoral Rolls the usual legal remedies of notice and hearing? (These were denied to the 65 lakh persons excluded in Bihar; they had to re-enter as “new voters”)
12. Why does the list of acceptable documents not include PAN Card, Driving License, MNREGA job card, ration card and passbook of nationalised banks all of which are accepted for a new voters by the ECI today and have higher evidentiary value?
13. Does the ECI have a de-duplication software? Does it plan to integrate that in the SIR process? (Lakhs of duplicate and junk entires have been found in the Final electoral rolls of Bihar)
14. Does the ECI plan to release machine readable files of the draft and final electoral rolls? What is the problem in publishing this data which is public information anyway?
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Yogendra Yadav is an Indian activist, psephologist and politician whose primary interests are in the political and social sciences. He was a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi from 2004 to 2016. T
aken from author’s X account @_YogendraYadav.
