Dr Bhalla, thank you for doing what the Election Commission should have done: counting. I agree with more of your piece than you might expect. The rolls needed cleaning, the dead and the duplicates had to go, and the 130 million in the headlines was never a count of the disenfranchised. Your Assam comparison is valuable. So is your finding that about five million eligible citizens were removed in West Bengal.
But let me put the citizen back where the Constitution puts him, at the centre. Article 326 sets three conditions, and only three: a citizen of India, eighteen years of age, ordinarily resident. A person who meets them “shall be entitled to be registered”. Everything else is fluff.
So the question is not how many names a “clean roll” should hold. It is this: how could anyone who met all three conditions fail to get onto the roll? Ask the people who were left out what they had to do to get back in. They were “mapped” against a roll of 2003 and served notices for a “logical discrepancy” in a parent’s spelling. Some were told to find their grandparents’ entries. Many were made afraid that their citizenship itself was in question, which no Electoral Registration Officer has the power to decide. In Punjab, 39 of every 40 people served notice turned out to be entitled all along. In West Bengal, 93 per cent of the appeals decided so far restored the voter.
And the Commission itself has since had to relax that process and retreat from it, with hearings waived and BLOs sent back to doors with Form 6. That retreat is its own verdict.
Rights don’t net out. A surplus name in Bihar doesn’t restore a deleted voter in Kolkata. And seven million is not “almost nothing”. It is Uttarakhand’s entire electorate.
Dr Bhalla, please don’t defend the indefensible.
KBS Sidhu
The claim made by
@roadscholarz that elections cannot be held in UP bcos the SIR final list (1.4 cr) is much below projected adult pop (16.2 cr) is easily falsified by Table 5 from
ssbhalla.substack.com/p/much… - look at low registration of 18-29 yr olds!