Confusion over voters: Bihar SIR remains mired in controversy

THE Bihar Assembly elections are just four weeks away, but the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the state’s electoral rolls continues to be under judicial scrutiny. The Supreme Court has told the Election Commission of India (ECI) to provide details of 3.66 lakh voters excluded from the final rolls that were published on September 30. The SIR has witnessed a lot of number-crunching ever since the ECI launched the ‘clean-up’ exercise on June 24. At that time, the count of electors in Bihar was 7.89 crore. The total dropped to 7.24 crore in the draft list that was issued on August 1 — the names of 65 lakh voters were removed on various grounds, including death, migration and duplication. The final list has 7.42 crore voters: 21.53 lakh names have been added to the draft list, while 3.66 lakh have been deleted, resulting in a net increase of 17.87 lakh.

The SC has rightly observed that the additions and deletions have caused confusion. The ECI needs to promptly answer some questions to allay the concerns of political parties and other stakeholders. Among the voters newly added, how many are there whose names were removed earlier? What were the grounds in both cases? And what were the reasons for the exclusion of voters from the final list? Thanks to the court’s intervention, the SIR has seen a degree of transparency, especially when the list of 65 lakh deleted names was made public after initial dilly-dallying by the poll panel.

It’s baffling that the ECI has not shared the number of illegal immigrants whose names were presumably struck off from the Bihar rolls. Citizenship — or the lack of it — had been cited as a key issue when the SIR was rolled out. Clearly, the Bihar exercise has not been flawless. The ECI would be well advised to address all the shortcomings before it initiates a pan-India SIR.