New Delhi: Over 90 former bureaucrats have expressed their concern over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, terming it an assault on democracy which would disenfranchise a huge segment of the voting population, including those who possess little or no documentation as proof of their citizenship.
In an open letter, 93 retired officers from the three all-India and various Union government services who are part of the ‘Constitutional Conduct Group’ (CCG), have alleged that continuing the “futile” SIR of the voter rolls in Bihar and extending the exercise to the rest of the country “poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced”.
“We are writing to express our alarm at what appears to be an assault on the very foundations of our democracy — the system of universal adult suffrage — the citizen’s right to vote. The assault is an insidious one where the purported attempt to clean up and sanitise the electoral rolls is likely to end up disenfranchising a very large segment of the voting population, particularly the poor and the marginalised, who possess little or no official documentation as proof of their citizenship.
“So far, a liberal and flexible approach to documentary corroboration of citizenship was followed in the preparation of electoral rolls knowing full well that most Indians lack adequate documents and certificates to establish their citizenship status. It was also recognised that the poor are especially deprived in their access to official documentation resources and therefore need proactive measures to ensure their inclusion. This process has now been reversed to ensure that those with poor access to documents will be deprived of their rights as voters,” the letter read.
The former civil servants said the Election Commission (EC) has inverted long-standing precedent by putting the onus on the elector to prove their citizenship, effectively given itself the authority to confer or take away citizenship rights without a constitutional mandate to do so, and conferred “extraordinary discretionary powers” to officials “to indulge in rent seeking to remove or add voters”.
“The continuation of this futile exercise and its proposed extension to the rest of the country, especially when all that is required is routine updation of existing data in the regular course of the EC’s scheduled activities, poses one of the biggest threats Indian democracy has faced, from the very institution that is meant to uphold the system of universal suffrage,” the letter said.
The former bureaucrats noted that the SIR is claimed to be an exercise in pursuit of the responsibility entrusted to the ECI under the Constitution, yet what it is effectively doing is to invert precept and practice to pass the burden for proving citizenship to the voter instead of the authorities having to prove why they have excluded someone based on fake citizenship.
“As if it was not enough to commission an SIR which was capable of subverting the electoral process in the garb of reforming it, the breakneck speed with which it has been implemented, the impossible timelines given to the booth level officers (BLOs), the grossly inadequate infrastructure provided or made available to digitise the data has made a mockery of the very elaborate procedures the ECI has laid down,” it read.
