Congress: Election Commission move to revise rolls an admission that all not well

The EC had said Tuesday that all existing electors in Bihar who were not on the rolls in 2003 would have to again provide documentation proving their eligibility. This was to be the beginning of a nationwide exercise.

A Congress committee tasked with looking into elections said in a statement Thursday: “In simple terms, the EC wants to discard the current electoral rolls entirely and create a fresh new electoral roll for the state… This is a clear and explicit admission by the EC that all is not well with India’s electoral rolls. Exactly what the Congress party and the Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi have been repeatedly pointing out with evidence from Maharashtra.”

The eight-member EAGLE committee said: “Lakhs of Union and state government officials will now control and dictate who has correct documents and who doesn’t, who gets to vote in the upcoming Bihar elections etc. This carries a huge risk of willful exclusion of voters using the power of the state machinery.”

At a meeting of political parties with Bihar’s Chief Electoral Officer Wednesday in Patna, representatives from the INDIA bloc — including the RJD, Congress, CPI(ML) Liberation and CPI(M) — unanimously rejected the SIR, calling it a ploy to exclude poor, rural and minority electors.

RJD Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Kumar Jha told The Indian Express that the party would go to the EC. “This is a massive exercise, and with the Bihar election notification expected in just two-and-a-half months, the timing is questionable. This process could have started much earlier. We feel very strongly that this entire exercise, is it a kind of cover? Cover to make sure that people from subaltern classes and minorities, backward and Dalits, are you going to invisibilise them?” he said.

Opposition parties flagged concerns on the commission’s stringent documentation requirements. The new rules set different proof thresholds by birth cohort. Voters born between July 1, 1987, and December 2, 2004, are required to provide proof of either parent’s Indian citizenship, while those born after December 2, 2004, need documentation for both parents.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said the EC was “acting like a stooge of the BJP” and asked whether the move was a backdoor attempt to implement the NRC.

“I don’t understand the reason behind the EC move or the rationale behind selecting these dates. This is nothing short of a scam. I seek clarification from the Commission on whether they are trying to implement the NRC through backdoors. In fact, this looks to be more dangerous than the NRC which every political party in opposition must resist,” she told reporters.

The Congress statement said the EC rules on birth certificates are “arbitrary, whimsical and onerous on the estimated 8.1 crore eligible voters in Bihar in 2025”.

CPI(ML) Liberation General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, too, drew parallels with Assam’s NRC exercise and argued in a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner that completing the verification of “78 million voters” in one month was “logically absurd and a logistical nightmare”.