Did ECI find 390 foreigners in Bihar’s electoral rolls?

Observing that no eligible voter from Bihar had approached the court and complained that they were left out of the revised rolls after the special intensive revision (SIR) and were not in receipt of the ‘speaking order’, the Supreme Court Bench of Justices Surya Kant, Joymalya Bagchi and Ujjal Bhuyan on Thursday refused to interfere in the electoral process set rolling in Bihar. The next hearing in the matter will be held on 16 October.

The Bench took note of the affidavit by a voter produced in court by senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the petitioner Association For Democratic Rights (ADR), which was contested by the ECI. The counsel for the Election Commission claimed that the voter was not listed in the draft list published on 1 August and hence had made a false claim in the affidavit, which amounted to perjury.

The court pulled up Bhushan and observed that he should have verified the content and facts before presenting the affidavit in court. The court brushed aside his contention that the affidavit was given to him by a ‘responsible person’ and his offer to present affidavits by other voters.

The Bench did concede the petitioners’ request to hear Yogendra Yadav, one of the petitioners, and listened to his objections to SIR. While the former psephologist reiterated objections he had made in his newspaper columns and in interviews on TV and YouTube channels, the Bench did not seem inclined to accept them at face value.

The court’s attitude was summed up by an observation by Justice Bagchi, who wondered why the voters were not willing to follow the appellate procedure prescribed for corrections in case of mistakes. 

Yadav, his words laced with sarcasm, urged the court to instruct the ECI to release the number of foreigners found in the electoral rolls during the exercise. While the ECI had justified SIR by claiming that it was its duty to ensure that non-citizens do not cast votes and interfere in the electoral process, it is yet to reveal the number of foreigners detected in the exercise.

The data released by the ECI, he claimed, indicated that only 1,087 voters were objected to on the ground that they are not Indian citizens; and only 390 of them were sustained by the ECI, Yadav told the court. Pointing out that as many as 796 voters on the list filed applications against themselves saying 'I am a foreigner', Yadav wondered of a world we are living in.

It would be a great service to the country, he declared, if the court can direct the ECI to state the number of foreigners it had found in Bihar. The jibe was apparently a reference to the propaganda by the BJP that infiltrators from abroad had flooded Bihar as voters.

Pointing out other absurdities in figures related to SIR, Yadav claimed that with the elimination of more women from the rolls under SIR, the gender gap, which was improving steadily, has been affected adversely. Live Law quoted Yadav as saying, “The gender gap was improving. From 20 lakh it had come down to 7 lakh. After SIR, it became 16 lakh. Ten years of gains have been wiped out.” The pattern, he feared, could be replicated wherever SIR is implemented next.

How could names appear in Kannada and Tamil scripts in Bihar rolls, Yadav wondered. Media reports had also claimed that a BJP functionary’s name had appeared in the electoral roll in Gujarati script. If this was not gibberish, what was gibberish, he asked.

“There are 4.21 lakh cases of wrong house numbers and 5.24 lakh duplicate names. In some cases, there are 3,000 more names in the final list than in the draft,” he told the Bench, adding that he could provide lists for verification.

He questioned whether the ECI used any de-duplication software, remarking that even a basic AI programme could identify duplicates by photo and name. He also urged the ECI to reveal the percentage of the 12 documents (including Aadhaar) used by the citizens to submit their enumeration forms.