ECI’s Motto of 'No Voter to Be Left Behind' Has Now Been Left Far Behind |
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As the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in West Bengal has concluded and assembly elections are only days away, about 90 lakh names have been removed from the voter lists. About 57% of them are from districts bordering Bangladesh. According to media reports, Muslims in several districts are disproportionately affected.
Exclusions highlighted in the media include a former justice of the Calcutta high court, the 88-year-old grandson of Nandalal Bose who decorated the original copy of the Constitution, a decorated Indian Air Force veteran, and a Kargil war veteran, among many others.
Without going into the legality of whether the Election Commission of India (ECI) was empowered to conduct SIR in the manner it is being conducted, we would have been happy if ECI had succeeded in its avowed motto of ‘no voter to be left behind.’
Till now, SIR has been completed in nine major states viz. Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Combined with special revision in Assam, the eligible population covered so far has been more than 63% of persons above 18 years, is quite substantial and diversified. About 45 million names were deleted on account of them having been ‘absentee’, ‘shifted’, or ‘missing’, as per the draft rolls in the nine SIR states.
Moreover, in the final rolls, the gap between the expected eligible citizens and the number of registered electors in these 10 states is around 70 million. If a similar trend persists in the remaining states also, the gap for all-India is likely to become more than 110 million.
As this significant gap can largely be attributed to deletion of absentees, shifted and missing voters, and logical discrepancies, in this article we propose to discuss whether any eligible citizen, as enshrined in section 19 of Representation of the People Act 1950 (RPA), can be deprived from registration in the electoral rolls.
Recapitulation of statutory provisions
In the SIR, electors whose filled-in enumeration forms........