Two weeks to elections, around 27L people, as things stand, will not be able to vote in upcoming Bengal elections. This is unprecedented. And deeply worrying. Their status in the electorate is suspended, because processes that’ll allow them to be on the new voter roll, being created through EC’s Special Intensive Revision, have not been completed. The question is, how did the system get to this point?
The onus of proving eligibility was passed on to the voter. Because of the short timeframe of just five months to create a new electoral roll, the process was inevitably going to be challenging, chaotic and, in effect, unfair. Bengal is densely populated, with diverse communities, high rates of partial literacy, also hobbled by poor tech upgrades, and an uneven documentation culture. Which state-level documents, or residency papers, were legit for SIR has not been consistently determined – recall Aadhaar in Bihar. Bengali Muslims, Matuas, Nepalis, have all suffered. The breakdown in trust between TMC, the incumbent party in Bengal govt, and CEC, has meant a fractious rollout, vitiated exchanges. The Supreme Court stepped in to make the last-mile journey smoother. But that hasn’t, exactly, worked out. Indian citizenshipis multi-layered. So, deciding on documents that prove citizenship needs thinking through, training and time. In election time, with tight deadlines, how can some tribunals be enough?
That fully documented Bengalis have got excluded showed that, depending on a tech interface, which didn’t even account for spelling variations, was an error. And, there’s this robotic demand for “perfect” papers, in a highly unequal society. If the idea of Indian citizenship has hardened and narrowed, EC should have had a nationwide programme, conducted over a longish period, sensitising everyone, before embarking on SIR.
Most important, there’s a principle involved here. Recall what jurisprudence says: better a hundred guilty persons go free, than one innocent getting convicted. The same applies to the fundamental right to vote. Let’s assume a huge number, say, 25L, of those excluded in Bengal are found to be ineligible after a thorough check. That still leaves around 200,000 voters who will have lost their franchise. We can’t dismiss that as a small proportion of voters. We have to recognise it’s a big blow to the spirit of electoral democracy.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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