The Election Commission has started the second phase of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in 12 states and union territories. If seen, this is not a trivial exercise because about 51 crore voters will be verified. BLOs will go door-to-door and investigate in three rounds; online forms can also be filled. On the face of it, this is a campaign to clean up democracy, but there are many layers within it and some uncomfortable questions too.
Under SIR, deceased, transferred or fictitious names will be removed and new eligible voters will be added. After the first SIR in Bihar, 68 lakh names were removed – imagine, for whom and for what purpose were these names voting for so many years? Seen from this point of view, the announcement of SIR is welcome. But questions arise when the Election Commission announces that the old voter list of 2002–2004 will be considered as permanent proof of validity.
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The Election Commission says that those whose names or whose parents’ names were in the SIR from 2002 to 2004 will not be required to provide documents. This exemption is a policy mistake. The implication is that “there was no infiltration into India before 2002 and every person included in the list for 2002–2004 is a legal citizen of India.” Making the citizenship of infiltrators permanent on the basis of twenty years old voter list is like declaring a “holiday for the guards” at the outpost of democracy. Declaring the 2002–2004 list as “true” is a convenient shortcut, but democracy never works by shortcuts. The Election Commission should review this policy, so that the public can be assured that there are no infiltrators in the voter list.