The ruling NDA’s ally and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Lok Sabha leader Lavu Sri Krishna Devarayalu tells Preetha Nair that the Election Commission should start the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Andhra Pradesh as early as possible so that every voter can be counted on.
Excerpts:
TDP has approached EC with certain recommendations…
The opposition is trying to build a narrative on the ground against the ongoing SIR in Bihar on several counts. Our party is against it. That’s the reason the TDP approached the EC and presented suggestions about Andhra Pradesh. We are not talking about Bihar, Andaman, or Tamil Nadu. Our focus is clearly on Andhra Pradesh. We told them that we had elections a year back, and the next election is due only in 2029. We have four years in hand. Since the EC has made it clear that SIR will be conducted across the country, we asked them to start the process in Andhra as early as possible.
But Bihar got very little time to do the exercise.
We haven’t mentioned Bihar in our letter to the EC.
What are the other concerns?
Our concern is about the main stakeholders in this exercise, that is the voter. It’s neither about the politicians, MLAs who are contesting, the officers who have to oversee this whole process, nor the EC conducting this activity. It’s about the comfort that we can provide to the voter. We want them to be as comfortable as possible. In Andhra, we have everything available and enough time for four years. We want them to start it soon so that every voter can be counted on, every voter’s identity can be created, and we make sure that every voter is identified transparently.
Did you demand Aadhaar and Voter ID cards to be considered as documents of SIR?
The Supreme Court had said that Aadhaar cannot be linked with the voter ID. So we demand that at least bring the authentication of fingerprinting, the tech, not the data, to the voter ID, so that it becomes unique.
Only a few documents are considered valid for voter registration for SIR.
Our point is how to make a voter ID unique so that one person won’t have multiple votes. It is possible only by bringing in technology to the voter ID. The second thing is how we can bring AI. We are trying to make the point that there’s enough available technology with which the same person having multiple votes can be identified and rectified with the help of AI. We want to use technology as much as possible. In AP, we have four years in hand to do that.
Another contentious issue is citizenship. There is a fear that the exercise will strip citizenship from individuals deemed ineligible for the electoral roll.
It is an Opposition narrative that we want EC to nip it in the bud. We don’t want that narrative to proliferate.
There are concerns SIR will disenfranchise voters from poor and marginalised sections.
There are two things. The first one is about documents. The EC says that they were able to get 93% of the voters registered in Bihar in 15 days. Second is that we have suggested in our letter to the ECI about having mobile Booth Level Officers (BLOs). This will enable a migrant worker who works in a different district to enroll his vote without having to travel. Then the EC told us that they have gone further ahead and provided WhatsApp as a tool to enroll, and have given advertisements across the country on this. However, mobile BLOs will solve the issue of migrant workers not having access to Wi-Fi.