Seven Ways SIR in Bengal and Delimitation in Assam Have Altered India's Electoral Playing Field Forever |
New Delhi: While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has recorded thumping victories in West Bengal and Assam in the recently concluded assembly elections, the polls have also brought into sharp focus the role played by two special factors. This includes the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls by the Election Commission in West Bengal just months ahead of the polls, and the delimitation of constituencies conducted in Assam in 2023. While electoral numbers may focus on anti-incumbency as in West Bengal, or the success of welfare schemes and governance as in Assam, the role played by these two exercises in the two border states has larger ramifications for India’s electoral democracy, the legitimacy of the election process, and the road ahead.
In a recent op-ed, political scientist Gilles Verniers had referred to academic Pippa Norris’ argument that an election is not a single event but a sequential chain including 11 links that stretch from the drawing of constituencies, the compilation of voter rolls, the counting of ballots, to the acceptance of results. Any violation of standards at any one link weakens this chain. Verniers said that while it is not that the elections do not have meaning, but “the analysis of the elections is completely tarnished by the default of procedures.”
Speaking to The Wire on May 4, Verniers had elaborated, “It is not just individual links being weakened it is the legitimation of the entire chain in question. One underlying problem is when rules of the electoral game are unilaterally changed by the very actors who stand to gain from it.”
“It is not just one problem in particular but it is a combination of factors which taken together affect the legitimacy of the whole elections. Starting with the attempt to change the electoral rolls through the SIR, and in the case of Assam it was the delimitation exercise done not by the autonomous delimitation commission but by the election commission again creating electoral advantage for one party, the BJP.”
So how have institutions procedures raised questions in the conduct of these two elections?
1) SIR in West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu, but not in Assam
The SIR was first announced by the Election Commission in June, months before the assembly elections held in November last year. The Wire has reported that a look at election rules show that the term does not exist, even though revision of electoral rolls remains a legitimate and regular exercise undertaken by the Election Commission.
While defending the need to conduct the SIR so close to the elections in Bihar, Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had in October pointed to election laws.
“On SIR being conducted before the elections, if you go by the Representation of the People Act,........