SIR Hiccups: Rights, Wrongs, Lessons & Blame

There are several lessons to be learnt from the recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in several states, with West Bengal giving us more headaches than the earlier ones in Bihar, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Before we assess what went right, what wrong, and who should share the blame, let us first give ourselves a synopsis of the completed SIR process in West Bengal, which, of course, excludes those deletions that are yet to be decided by the appellate process. Some of the restorations may, regrettably happen well after the election process gets concluded.

It is clearly problematic if so many voters cannot exercise their franchise, but it is possible to exaggerate this denial of rights. I have seen no election in which many voters failed to find their names in the voter lists, but what is different this time is the scale of deletions.

The numbers put out in the case of West Bengal, which votes in two phases on 23 and 29 April, suggest that over 90 lakh names have been deleted. That is a large number, but the headlines are simply misleading. When newspapers say that 90 lakh names have been deleted, and that these deletions work out to 12 percent of the pre-SIR voter numbers, they are speaking a half-truth. Hidden in the 90-lakh figure is the 63 lakh deletions due to deaths, absence from registered addresses or permanent migrations to other states. These are valid exclusions, and they make sense for they are key to preventing bogus and fraudulent voting by others.

Lesson 1: Don’t believe the headlines. The number which matters is 27 lakh deletions due to “logical discrepancies” in some of the names, and this number amounts to just over 3.5 percent of the pre-SIR electorate of 7.6 crore voters. Even this exclusion has been done after judicial scrutiny, though they may yet be subject to an appellate process.

Lesson 2: The related lesson to learn is that if such an extensive revision is going to take place, it must not be done so close to the election deadlines. The Election Commission (EC) should clearly do this kind of exercise at least a year in advance of elections (as it is doing in Uttar Pradesh), so that all eligible voters can submit their claims to be included or appeal against wrong exclusions.

But there is a caveat. Given that every year there are multiple state and other elections every year, it would mean SIR would have to become an annual exercise. Can so many states be asked to provide the manpower to do so every year not only to hold elections, but to conduct SIRs? This point in fact makes the case for one-nation-one-election more powerful than merely adding up the costs of frequent elections and their impact on governance. If SIR is to be done, say, once in a decade, it will still happen close to some state assembly elections. That is unavoidable.

Lesson 3: You cannot oppose both SIR and a National Register of Citizens (NRC). The ideal thing is to do a proper NRC every census year, which then means that the EC will have the NRC results to march with the extant voters’ list.

Several other arguments sound valid, but sound hypocritical when examined closely.

Many people on social media and prime time TV have gone apoplectic about so many people being denied their democratic rights. But their outrage has to be balanced by two other facts. One, denying somebody the vote is definitely wrong, but allowing non-citizens and fraudulent or duplicate voting to happen is equally a vitiation of the democratic process.

Another argument, which all liberal politicians espouse, goes to the heart of democracy: the value of each vote. In the Lok Sabha, delimitation and the number of seats in each state has been frozen since 1976. As a result, the Uttar Pradesh voter’s vote has a value that is just 77 percent that of Tamil Nadu. Why should a democracy that believes in one-person-one-vote allow an Uttar Pradesh citizen’s vote to be valued lower than the one in Tamil Nadu or Goa? The argument about democratic deficit cuts both ways.

Yet another argument goes something like this: in many places in West Bengal, the deletions are significantly larger among Muslims. Once again, the headlines mislead. One report in theprint.in talked about the bulk of the deletions being among Muslims and Matuas (Bangladeshi Hindus mostly). But isn’t this logical? If the border districts - and many Muslim-majority districts are on the borders - have seen more deletions, it is consistent with the assumption that there have been many illegal migrations from Muslim-majority Bangladesh, including significant chunks of Hindus who fled Islamist persecution over the decades.

An data-based study by Professors Vidhu Shekar and Milan Kumar – faculty members of the SP Jain Institute of Management & Research and IIM Calcutta respectively – has noted that the surge in West Bengal voters is not backed by actual demographic trends in births, deaths and migration. They estimate that West Bengal’s voter list contained 1.04 crore more names in 2024 than warranted. This figure is surprisingly close to the 90 lakh voter deletions in the voter lists after the latest phase of SIR.

The last question is simple: who should be held responsible for the exclusion of so many voters just weeks before voting?

We cannot absolve the Election Commission of all the blame, but we must emphasise that the Trinamool Congress and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee must shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility for these exclusions. They obstructed, threatened and generally tried to prevent state-level election personnel from doing their jobs, and looking at the way in which judicial officers were held hostage by mobs for several hours in Malda the other day, it would seem as if the state machinery in general has not been in a cooperative mood.

SIR cannot work efficiently without the active participation of political parties, who can help voters correct mistakes and also make appeals against any mistaken exclusions. In Kerala and Tamil Nadu, this is what political parties like the DMK, AIADMK, LDF and UDF constituents did, and SIR went through without hiccups.

It was in Mamata Banerjee’s state alone that the process was hindered and rendered partially infructuous, and the Supreme Court had to intervene multiple times to get it going. The blame must be laid squarely at Didi’s doorstep. It was her folly from the word go.