Ask why Assam does not need an SIR

Sometimes, a tiny move gives the whole game away. On 27 October, the Election Commission of India (ECI) held a press conference to announce that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls would now travel to 12 states and Union Territories. But Assam, where elections are due in April next year, was not on the list.

Then, on 17 November, it quietly issued another order for a ‘special revision’ of the voter list in Assam. The media didn’t even blink. But this odd little order exposes the cosy choreography between the Commission and the BJP.

Start by recalling the big argument offered in favour of the SIR. From day one, the ECI has been chanting that the SIR is meant to ensure that only Indian citizens are on the voter rolls. One of the key objectives of the SIR, it has argued, is to weed out foreign nationals from the rolls — which is why the process demands proof of citizenship from every voter.

That’s why the Commission refuses to treat Aadhaar as a valid document since Aadhaar is not a proof of citizenship. The Commission hints at this discreetly while spokespersons for the ruling BJP declare this from the rooftops — that the voter rolls are full of foreign nationals who need to be thrown out.

Now ask yourself: which Indian state has the most serious problem of foreign migration? Without a shadow of doubt that state is Assam. It isn’t even a new issue in the state. It’s at least half-a-century old and the historic Assam movement gathered steam around this very question. The Assam Accord under Rajiv Gandhi was centred on citizenship. For 40 years, the dispute over its implementation has refused to die.

Assam’s voter rolls have seen huge political storms around the so-called ‘D-voters’, or doubtful voters. To settle the matter, the Supreme Court presided over a massive citizenship-verification exercise in the state, to produce a National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam.

Published finally in August 2019, the NRC included 3.11 crore people and excluded about 19 lakh. No other Indian state has ever seen anything so big, or so bitter, on the question of citizenship.

Now put points one and two together and draw the obvious conclusion: if there is any state where a rigorous test of citizenship may actually be required in the voter rolls, it is Assam. If the argument for the SIR is genuine, Assam should have been the very first state to go through the exercise.

Now look at how the ECI behaved. When asked why Assam was excluded from the SIR, the Chief Election Commissioner said Assam’s citizenship rules are different from the rest of the country and, therefore, its order would come separately. That could only mean one thing: Assam’s SIR would be stricter than the rest of India.

Where the rest of the country is being held to the 2002 roll, Assam would be judged against 1971. And since the NRC has already completed that process, the voter-list revision in Assam would not just be intensive, it would be the most intensive.

Brace yourself for the U-turn. The order issued on 17 November for Assam is not stricter, as you might reasonably expect, but shockingly lenient. The Commission has dropped the word ‘intensive’ from ‘Special Intensive Revision’; Assam will have a ‘special revision’. And this isn’t some harmless wordplay. Instead of tightening the sieve for Assam, the Commission has quietly removed the sieve altogether.

Look at what this means in practice. Across the rest of the country, every voter must fill an enumeration form. In Assam, no one needs to fill anything. The BLO (Booth Level Officer) will visit your house, verify names, make corrections, if needed, and that’s it.

In the rest of the country, you must prove that your name or a family member’s was on the 2002 list. If not, you must explain where your family was at the time. In Assam, this question won’t be asked at all. If you fail to produce a 2002 document elsewhere in India, you will have to furnish papers to prove your citizenship. In Assam, this whole exercise has been scrapped; no one will need to show any document. If only this simple, sensible, transparent system applied to every state in the country.

Is your head spinning yet? A bitter pill is being shoved down the throat of the entire country, supposedly to prevent a dangerous disease. But the patient that clearly shows the symptoms is being discharged from hospital.

If this upside-down logic is confusing, here is the final clue. Under Supreme Court orders, the NRC in Assam has already checked the papers of every resident. After six long years, the exercise found 19 lakh people who could not prove Indian citizenship, and whose names were left out of the NRC. You’d think the Commission now has an easy job — just strike these 19 lakh names off the voter rolls.

But to understand the real game, you need to know the break-up of the 19 lakh people who didn’t make it to the 2019 NRC — and who stands to lose if their names were deleted. The official data hasn’t been released, but everyone knew that a majority of these alleged illegal immigrants from Bangladesh were not Muslims but Hindus.

Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma even admitted in a media interaction that out of the 19 lakh, only 7 lakh are Muslims. The rest are Hindus — Bengali Hindus, Assamese Hindus and Gorkha Hindus. It’s no secret that the BJP first built its base in Assam among Bengali Hindus. Which means that if the voter list was intensively revised in Assam and all 19 lakh names were struck out, the biggest political loser would be the BJP.

Now does the picture snap into place? Still wondering whether the Election Commission and the BJP are working in sync?

Views are personal. More of Yogendra Yadav’s writing can be read here