BJP could pay a heavy price for electoral roll revision in Bihar

The special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar may turn out to be an ill-conceived and ill-timed exercise. It could also prove to be counterproductive for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Hearing challenges to the SIR, the Supreme Court has asked the Election Commission of India (ECI) questions about the timing of the exercise just before an election, its authority to conduct the SIR, and the validity of the review process. No interim stay on the exercise has been granted. The next hearing will be on July 28 when the draft electoral roll is ready.

What is happening in Bihar is also expected to be repeated in West Bengal, where the BJP wants to come to power in the March 2026 Assembly elections. In both states, the unsaid assumption is that illegal Bangladeshi Muslims have entered the electoral registers in large numbers, helping anti-BJP parties.

The ECI has defended the Bihar exercise as a necessary and constitutionally mandated clean-up of electoral rolls.

However, for the first time, already enrolled voters have to prove their eligibility. The 2.93 crore voters who enrolled after 2003, having voted in several elections since then, have to now prove their citizenship. Young voters born after 1987 must also provide parental birth and residence proof, which may be hard to obtain.

Earlier, the ECI’s standing instructions to enumerators were not to remove any voter names without a positive proof of ‘non-citizenship’. The responsibility for proving non-citizenship was on objectors to the inclusion of a voter's name. Now, the burden of proof is on the voters to prove their citizenship. What is worse,  documents like Aadhaar, ration cards, etc. are not accepted for electoral registration (11 documents, including caste certificates and land records, are).

Judicial decisions in the past have ruled that citizenship attestation is not required at the verification stage of preparing the electoral roll. Self-declaration was sufficient.

The ECI is not qualified to conduct citizenship verification, and if it does so, it is confusing its functioning with that of the Ministry of Home Affairs. In its annual report of 1983, the ECI referring to the request of Mizoram chief minister to delete the names of illegal immigrants from the electoral roll revision conducted in 1983-1984 had said, “It would be inappropriate and without jurisdiction to issue any instructions to local election officials to delete the names of illegal immigrants whose names had been included in the successive electoral rolls.”

The verification of electoral rolls takes place under the Representation of the People Act 1950, while citizenship verification is under the Citizenship Act of 1955. The aim of the SIR is to clean up the electoral rolls by removing the names of the dead or those who have moved away. It is the home ministry’s job is to identify illegal immigrants using lineage and birth records.

Because the burden of documentation required to prove voter eligibility resembles that of proving citizenship, the Opposition has suggested that the SIR is akin to preparing a National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Even the Supreme Court has asked the ECI to consider Aadhaar, voter ID cards, and ration cards for voter inclusion. Earlier, the ECI had pushed for linking Aadhaar cards with voter registration — something that was halted by the Supreme Court in 2015. However, in 2021, the government amended the Representation of the People Act 1950, allowing voluntary Aadhaar collection for voter identification.

The next year, in 2022, the ECI started seeking information on Aadhaar numbers using Form 6B for voter registration, but clarified that its submission was voluntary and no voter would be removed from the rolls for not submitting it. It asked everyone to link their voter ID card with Aadhaar card. This was ostensibly to weed out duplicate voters, prevent impersonation, and use Aadhaar’s unique biometric identification for voter verification.

In its new avatar, the ECI, however, has ruled against Aadhaar. It is not surprising, therefore, to see the Opposition protesting against the Bihar roll revision as a political manoeuvre.

The operationalisation of this exercise, however, depends on the electoral enumeration machinery used. The ECI by itself does not have a large all-India staff. During elections and enumeration exercises, a part of the state government employees in effect become ECI’s temporary machinery.

In Bihar, the enumeration forms are being distributed and collected by Jeevika Didis, Shiksha Mitras, and Anganwadi Sevikas, for example. They are likely to be supervised by other state government employees. If they agree with the alleged aims of their political masters, only then can there be exclusion of voters perceived to be inimical to the ruling dispensation.

While the BJP has defended the SIR publicly, there is anxiety within. Long term voters of the party are upset at being asked to prove their citizenship. A senior Bihar BJP leader was reported as claiming that 15 to 20 per cent of BJP voters and around 10 to 15 per cent of JD(U) voters might not be able to vote due to documentation issues.

There is unhappiness all around. People with no documents, no android phones, without adequate literacy, and technical skills to upload documents fear that they will be deleted from the voter list. Bihar is a source of large out-migration. The migrants who might even have the requisite documents to prove their eligibility will have to go back to Bihar or upload the documents from wherever they are to register themselves. Most Bihar migrants cannot afford to leave their jobs and go to Bihar to fill the enumeration forms and provide citizenship documents. Yet, they feel that if they are left out of the electoral register, they will go out of the government system.

The rejection of Aadhaar and ration cards by the ECI is also likely to create apprehensions about the usefulness of these documents to get government benefits. This could potentially signal to the Dalits, backward castes, and the poor that their benefits from government schemes may be lost which are based on these documents.

If this fear of government benefits being at risk takes hold among voters in Bihar, then it is bad news for the BJP. It may face the same electoral prospect as in the general election of May 2024, when the perception gathered momentum that the BJP was going to change the Constitution and end job reservations.

(Bharat Bhushan is a New Delhi-based journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.