INDIA bloc to explore legal options to challenge special revision of electoral rolls in Bihar 

A day after their meeting with the Election Commission (EC) on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar ahead of the Assembly election, the INDIA bloc is mulling exploring legal options to challenge the poll body’s move. Opposition leaders have underlined that the EC has more or less confirmed that the revision could weed out 20% of the State’s population, who migrate for work.

The parties also strongly condemned Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s remarks made during the meeting, where he reportedly said, “it is a new Election Commission”.

Speaking to The Hindu, senior Rashtriya Janata Dal leader and Rajya Sabha MP Manoj K. Jha said that the EC heard the INDIA bloc leaders but did not “listen” and no answers were given on the questions they raised. “He (Mr. Kumar) said, this is a new commission. Members may be new, but the Election Commission is a perennial institution and has to be seen in continuum. The CEC’s attitude that reflects from his remarks is unsettling,” Mr. Jha said.

He further added that the Election Commission’s stance on the migrant population imperils voting rights of people from the Dalit, Backward and minority communities, as they are the ones who usually travel out of the State seeking work.

“I see this as an elite coup against the subalterns,” Mr. Jha said. The RJD leader also said that after Wednesday’s meeting the Opposition has only two options ahead of them — take a legal recourse and mobilise public opinion. “We will be doing both,” he said.

General secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation Dipankar Bhattacharya said his party has already started public mobilisation on the question of “defending voting rights and Constitution”, which he described as the biggest agenda in the upcoming Bihar polls. Describing the mood of Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Bhattacharya said that the “EC couldn’t be least bothered” about the “grave concerns” raised by the Opposition parties.

“As per our estimates, five crore voters in Bihar will have to prove their citizenship and the EC appears to be very complacent about it,” Mr. Bhattacharya said at a press conference. Both Mr. Jha and Mr. Bhattacharya said that before prescribing a list of documents that the EC is expecting the electorate to produce, it had not conducted any study to ascertain whether the documents would be readily available. “The EC has exceeded its brief with this exercise. The EC’s mandate is to deal with the Representation of People Act, but with this it has entered the tricky terrain of citizenship,” Mr. Bhattacharya said.

He also criticised CEC Mr. Kumar’s remarks. “Commissioners may change, but the Election Commission doesn’t,” Mr. Bhattacharya said. CPI(ML) leader N. Sai Balaji, who also attended the meeting, accused the CEC of not following the basic “decorum” during the interaction with the Opposition. “I will not go into the details of the exchange, many things were said,” he said.

On the question of migrant workers, Mr. Balaji flagged the sequence of Mr. Kumar’s remarks. “During the conversation he said, election margins in Bihar polls are usually low, Mr. Kumar said, and, then, in the same breath, he went on to say that roughly 20% are migrant workers. He stopped at this without elaborating on the connection between the two statements.

Senior Congress party leaders, including the head of the media and publicity wing Pawan Khera, Bihar Congress president Rajesh Kumar and the All India Congress Committee in-charge for Bihar Krishna Allavaru, said at a press conference that the role of the EC had come under strong suspicion.

‘Clear conspiracy’

Mr. Khera observed that the ‘SIR’ was a clear conspiracy to disenfranchise Bihar’s voters and deny them their basic right to vote. He took strong exception to the way the CEC dealt with a delegation of eleven parties belonging to the INDIA bloc. “If I quote the CEC, he said, ‘this is the new normal’. He said it is new Election Commission. And what is the new normal? They will decide which leader they will meet and how many leaders can come to meet them,” Mr. Khera said.

“The CEC has himself said that the Commission expects around 20% of voters in Bihar to be disenfranchised,” Mr. Rajesh Kumar said.