CPI(ML) Liberation opposes electoral roll revision in Bihar, warns it may cause mass disenfranchisement

New Delhi, Jun 25 (PTI) The CPI(ML) Liberation on Wednesday wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner, expressing strong objections to the decision to conduct a "special intensive revision" of electoral rolls in Bihar.

In the letter to the CEC, CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said those who may not be able to furnish necessary documents during this time frame will be liable to be deleted from the electoral roll, and this may lead to disenfranchisement for many.

He said the EC expects to conduct complete house-to-house enumeration of more than 78 million voters of Bihar within just one month and collect filled-in enumeration forms from all. The 2003 voter list which the EC proposes to treat as the base list had some 50 million voters, and voters added subsequently will have to furnish a whole range of identity proofs, he added.

"Electors not able for some reason to furnish necessary documents during this time frame will be liable to be deleted from the electoral roll and hence deprived from their voting right," Bhattacharya said.

"In terms of its scale and nature, this special intensive revision will be akin to the NRC exercise in Assam. In Assam, it took six years for the government to complete the exercise and even then the Assam government is not ready to accept the NRC as the final list of citizens," he said.

He also said the population covered in Assam was 33 million while the EC expects to cover close to 80 million electors in Bihar in just one month, that too the month of July when Bihar has a busy monsoon and agriculture season.

"Additionally, it is well known that millions of electors in Bihar work outside of the state," he said.

The last time such an intensive revision was conducted in Bihar was in 2002 when there were no elections approaching and the size of the electorate was around 50 million, he said.

"Our party has been most closely involved with the landless poor's right to vote movement in Bihar and we are afraid that a special intensive revision campaign within such a short time frame ahead of the elections will result in utter chaos and large-scale inaccuracies and deletions. We therefore request you to drop the logistically absurd idea of a special intensive revision at this period and carry out normal updating of the electoral roll," he wrote.

"We hope you will seriously respond to our concern and make sure that in the 75th anniversary of the Constitution and the republic, the people of Bihar are not deprived of their fundamental democratic right to vote," he added.

The EC has issued instructions to carry out the revision in Bihar to weed out ineligible names and ensure all eligible citizens are included in the electoral roll, allowing them to exercise their franchise in the polls slated later this year.

Amid allegations of voter data being fudged to help the BJP, the exercise also introduces complete transparency in the process of addition or deletion of electors in the rolls. PTI AO ZMN