The Special Intensive Revision of voter lists in Bihar has wiped out 47 lakh adults and 16 lakh women in one stroke, election analyst and activist Yogendra Yadav told the Supreme Court today. During a crucial hearing of petitions challenging SIR, he also provided multiple details of “irregularities” after the top court asked petitioners to provide evidence of their claim that lakhs of people have been disenfranchised.
The Commission has objected, saying the petitioners were making “false claims in affidavits”.
In view of the Commission’s claims that not one person has challenged the “exclusion” of his name from the voter list and so, there were no unjustified exclusions, the top court has asked the State Legal Services Chairperson to deploy para-legal volunteers and government lawyers to help people file their appeals.
At the last hearing on Tuesday, the petitioners alleged that those disenfranchised could not appeal because the poll commission did not send individual notifications. The bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi had asked the petitioners to submit evidence of their claims.
During the hearing today, Yogendra Yadav told the court, “Gains of 10 years in gender ratio were wiped out in Bihar SIR”.
Earlier, the gap in the number of women in electoral rolls used to be 20 lakh. That dropped to 7 lakh this January,” Yadav said. “SIR made it 16 lakh again. I hope this does not happen across the country,” he added.
The voter list, he said, indeed needs improvement, since the existing measures did not fully succeed. “The contention is not about the rights of the Election Commission. It is about the nature of revisions being suggested. What SIR has done is that it has weaponized a normal, benign process,” he said.
On this journey, the Commission, he said, has used “three toxic weapons” — systemic exclusion, structural exclusion, and possibility of targeted exclusion.
Bihar Special Intensive Revision has seen the largest shrinkage of voters at 47 lakh, he contended. “There was a deficit of 27 lakh people when SIR began. In one stroke, it has reached 81 lakh. Let them point out one election in history, where the gap between adult population and voters was 81 lakh,” he said.
Though the official estimate of adult population in Bihar was 8.22 crore in September — all of whom should have been on electoral rolls — the number of voters in the final rolls is 7.42 crore. The missing 80 lakh people comprise 10 per cent of the total adult population of Bihar, who have been disenfranchised through systemic exclusion, he said.
He also showed snippets from the final list, which has names written in Tamil, Kannada script. “Some names — spouse’s names, addresses have been left blank,” he said.
Earlier, Yogendra Yadav had flagged his concern about how SIR impacted marginalised groups like Dalits and migrant workers. He had also alleged that there were indications of serious mismatch, especially in cases of women and Muslims.
Representing the poll commission, senior advocate Rakesh Dwivedi insisted the petitioners are making false claims in affidavits.
“Earlier, the argument was that a large number of people were there in draft rolls, but their names disappeared without notice and the copy of the order has not been given… We have inquired… The affidavit filed by them is false… This person was not in the draft list because he did not submit the enumeration form,” he said.