The Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar is “deliberately calculated to disenfranchise Bihar’s mobile workforce during crucial electoral periods”, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Member of Parliament Manoj Jha said Sunday as he challenged the exercise in the Supreme Court.
This comes as the EC has begun the controversial exercise meant to update voter lists by verifying existing entries and adding new voters months ahead of elections. The process, which involves door-to-door verification, submission of address proofs, and filling out detailed forms, has been facing opposition on the ground that it could disenfranchise lakhs of voters.
Bihar’s massive migrant population who return home to vote “faces systematic exclusion through this malicious SIR process”, Jha told The Indian Express.
“Migrant workers lack local address proofs, cannot navigate complex form-based procedures from distant locations, and miss compressed timelines due to work commitments. This timing appears deliberately calculated to disenfranchise Bihar’s mobile workforce during crucial electoral periods,” he said.
The SIR process “exhibits legal malice by creating insurmountable barriers for citizens whose only ‘fault’ is economic migration, violating constitutional equality and universal suffrage principles”, he went on to say, adding: “SIR appears to be an exercise that is designed to exclude, using new tools of gerrymandering and administrative powers”.
The development comes after civil society organisations such as the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties have challenged the exercise. Under the exercise, all electors must submit an enumeration form, and those registered after 2003 have to additionally provide documentation establishing their citizenship.
Apart from documents such as passport, birth certificate, SC/ST certificate, an extract of one’s parents’ name in the electoral roll of Bihar as of January 1, 2003, “will be considered as a sufficient document in itself”, the ECI order said in its order last month.
