Voting rights remain a distant affair for NRIs

Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his public address at Kochi last week stated that the dignity of the NRIs have gone up owing to the healthy global relations of his government, when it comes to voting rights of NRIs the BJP government too cuts a sorry figure.

Even as the Lok Sabha passed a bill in 2018 allowing NRIs to cast proxy votes, the bill got lapsed as it was not taken up by the Rajya Sabha.

The centre informed the Supreme Court in 2022 that it was still working on the matter to come up with a solution that enables NRIs to cast votes by ensuring confidentiality. The SC also did not interfere further as it is a policy matter and the centre was working on it.

As per the final electorate of Kerala published on Tuesday, there are 88,223 overseas voters in the state, whereas the NRI population from Kerala was estimated to be around 35 lakhs. Among the 88,223, men constitute 82,324 while women constitute only 5,890.

As per existing norms NRIs who have enrolled in the voters list will have to be present physically to cast their votes. Since travelling down incurs high costs only a few among the registered voters will come down for voting. Political parties and their feeder organisations of NRIs even used to arrange chartered flights for NRIs.

Kerala has a high number of overseas voters in Muslim dominated areas of north Kerala. Of the 88,223 overseas voters, 34,909 are from Kozhikode and 15,106 are from Malappuram. The Congress and its coalition partner Indian Union Muslim League could be major beneficiaries of the overseas voters.

The bill passed by the Lok Sabha in 2018 provided for enabling overseas voters to appoint proxy voters to cast vote on behalf of them. There were concerns that the provision could be widely misused.