Bihar’s battle to claim its right and exert its will

The Modi government observes 25 June, the day Emergency was promulgated in 1975, as ‘Samvidhan Hatya Diwas’. The Modi and Yogi governments have a penchant for renaming places and assigning fancy names to various days of the year. But marking a day as the anniversary of the murder of the Constitution begs the question: when was the Constitution reborn? Or is it the Modi government’s way of telling us that it treats the Constitution as a dead letter?

June 25 this year was the 50th anniversary of the Emergency and the Election Commission of India (ECI) chose this very day to launch an unprecedented special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar. The irony couldn’t be more stark: What better way to mark the golden jubilee of the ‘murder of the Constitution’ than to target possibly the most fundamental constitutional right — universal adult franchise?!

The irony was not lost on the people of Bihar. They were struck by the uncanny resemblance of this electoral purification drive — this ‘votebandi’ — with the ‘notebandi’ (demonetisation) on the night of 8 November 2016. That too was purportedly an intensive purification drive, an effort to purge the economy of the evil influence of black money.

It didn’t take long for Bihar to wake up to the alarming immediate implications of the SIR — the threat of mass disenfranchisement, to the tune of 20 million electors.

Following Rahul Gandhi’s 7 August press conference exposing large-scale electoral fraud in the Mahadevpura assembly segment of the Bengaluru Central Lok Sabha constituency, the words ‘vote chori’ went viral in public discourse.

Thanks to the public protests and intense scrutiny, the scale of immediate exclusion was limited to 65 lakh instead of the feared 2 crore. However, with enumeration forms subject to the vagaries of ‘verification’, the danger of exclusion on a larger scale still looms large.

The SIR in Bihar exhibits three crucial departures from the established system of preparation of electoral rolls: (i) the principle of presumption of citizenship unless proved otherwise is now being replaced by prior proof of citizenship as a precondition of electoral inclusion; (ii) the clause ‘ordinarily resident of an area’ is being narrowly interpreted to eliminate large numbers of migrant workers, labelled as having ‘permanently shifted’; and (iii) the ECI is brazenly abdicating its responsibility to ensure an accurate and inclusive electoral roll, shifting the onus on to booth-level agents (BLAs) — appointed by political parties — and booth-level officers (BLOs) recruited by the government.

On top of this, the ECI continues to stubbornly ignore ground reports and video evidence exposing large-scale irregularities at every stage of the SIR exercise. Journalists and activists highlighting the ground reality are even being harassed with false cases.

It took several Supreme Court hearings and orders to compel an obstinate ECI to share lists of deleted electors with reasons for their deletion and to grant some evidentiary value to the Aadhaar card, the most widely available identity document, which the Indian state itself has been forcing on people to access almost all public services. Eventually, the Supreme Court has had to issue a categorical order to accept Aadhaar as a standalone 12th item in the ECI list of eligibility documents.

The ECI’s obvious reluctance to heed even suggestions coming from the Supreme Court makes it clear that only a determined and vigilant public campaign, right down to every booth, can control electoral fraud.

Reassuringly, Bihar has responded with characteristic vigour and mass dynamism.

Between the 9 July ‘chakka jam’ and the Voter Adhikar Yatra (17 August to 1 September), the people’s fear of disenfranchisement and electoral fraud has intensified into a palpable anger across the state.

The SIR, however, is not a Bihar-specific exercise; the template is now ready to be replicated across India.

People disenfranchised in the process are liable to be stripped of their citizenship; denied other basic rights and benefits; and possibly subjected to the horrors of detention and deportation.

Long before the current SIR got underway way, we saw how its precursor, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, created a category of ‘D-voters’ (doubtful voters), and the trauma this lot went through.

Some 3 lakh voters in Bihar have already been notified that their documents are not sufficient or satisfactory. Are we now going to see a permanent category of D-voters in Bihar too? It’s not hard to see how the suspension of the right to vote will lead to the denial of every other right and benefit, from rations to pensions and healthcare to housing.

The constant invocation of the bogey of ‘infiltration’ in the speeches of Modi, Shah and Bhagwat and the sudden, yet calculated launch of the SIR campaign are of a piece. The Sangh brigade’s politics now increasingly revolves around the demonisation of Muslim citizens as Bangladeshi or Rohingya ‘infiltrators’, and the SIR is another potent weapon in this hate-filled witch-hunt.

In Assam, it will serve as a third round of the traumatic NRC exercise, which has already excluded nearly 20 lakh residents from the citizenship register, ostensibly for lack of necessary documents.

SIR is unmistakably a political gambit.

It mirrors the demonetisation of November 2016, which helped the BJP win the Uttar Pradesh elections in February 2017. The NDA camp believes that the disruption and mass exclusion caused by the SIR will help it overcome the accumulated anti-incumbency of two decades.

But ground reports indicate that the trauma inflicted by the SIR, coupled with the insecurity caused by the land survey, the widespread land acquisition, the eviction drives and the soaring spiral of crime and corruption is strengthening people’s resolve to force change in Bihar.

Views are personal