The recent judgment of the Supreme Court justifying the validity of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in the case of Bihar and giving a clean chit to it appear to be deeply flawed. The controversy has been mostly restricted to debates about the resulting disenfranchisement of lakhs or crores of citizens and the manner of […]
Special Intensive Revision
Fresh citizenship framework suggested amidst electoral roll concerns
The ongoing exercise of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has raised serious concerns about the potential disenfranchisement of large numbers of citizens. In many instances, people are being asked to produce retrospective documents to establish their citizenship—documents that many genuine citizens are unable to provide. The challenge before policymakers is to identify prospective […]
India needs a door-to-door enumeration, not the SIR
The advantage of a fresh exercise is that it will not replicate the existing errors in the rolls and prevent inclusion and exclusion errors happening on a massive scale through the SIR It is a welcome measure that the Karnataka Cabinet has decided to ask the state Law Department to study the proposed Special Intensive […]
The way forward for determining citizenship
As there is no satisfactory means of proving a voter’s citizenship retrospectively, identify a prospective exercise to ensure that no genuine citizen gets excluded from the electoral roll or citizenship Not only civil society organisations even officialdom is now openly resisting the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. An assistant electoral registration officer in […]
Opinion: The SIR in Bihar was a futile bureaucratic exercise
If only a mere 0.1% residents are likely to be undocumented immigrants, as evidenced in Bihar, is there any logic in this retrospective SIR exercise being conducted country-wide and harassing 96.88 crore citizens, asks the author. A tsunami of allegations and counter-allegations has erupted in the mess involving the final electoral rolls in Bihar after […]
When the Election Commission becomes a threat to democracy
Once a constitutional safeguard, the ECI now risks enabling the erosion of India’s democratic norms through partisanship and opacity. The Election Commission of India (ECI) was set up on January 25, 1950, one day before the country became a Republic. So, historically, the ECI predates the Republic of India, which is an important factoid that […]
Interview of Prof Jagdeep Chhokar on Bihar’s 65-lakh question
This was interviewed by Herjinder. “Are we to believe that 22–25 lakh people died in just six months, and another 37 lakh left?” The Election Commission of India’s month-long charade of ‘fixing’ the voter rolls of Bihar — an exercise now better known as the ‘Special Intensive Revision’ — has reached its first big milestone. […]
SIR पारदर्शी नहीं है, न ही यह निष्पक्ष है… पढ़िए ADR के संस्थापक जगदीप छोकर का पूरा इंटरव्यू
24 जून के नोटिफिकेशन में लिखा है कि जो लोग 1 जनवरी, 2003 से पहले मतदाता सूची में थे, उन्हें भारत का नागरिक माना जाएगा। यानी इसके बाद के लोग नागरिक नहीं माने जाएंगे! नागरिक ना मानना बहुत बड़ी बात है। सुप्रीम कोर्ट ने 10 जुलाई की सुनवाई में कहा भी था कि आप नागरिकता […]
Bihar SIR: Doing the right thing the wrong way
Expecting uneducated migrants to fill and upload online forms to enroll as voters is a flight of fancy. The Election Commission still has time to take corrective steps A correct and up-to-date electoral roll is sine qua non for a free and fair election in a democracy. However, given the size, diversity, and geographical dispersion of population […]
Risk of vanishing votes in Bihar’s revised roll
According to a full-page advertisement issued by the Bihar CEO on July 5, voters in Bihar could submit their Enumeration Forms (EFs) by July 25. The article was originally published in The Tribune.