Dead men tell no tales. But in West Bengal, they can apparently cast votes. That is just one of many anomalies thrown up by the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state. An anomaly that the Election Commission (EC) is now firefighting to fix under the gimlet-eyed watch of chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her party the Trinamool Congress and an expectant Opposition.
Admittedly, SIR in West Bengal is a mammoth task. As per the last records, there are 7.6 crore voters whom the SIR needs to scan and clean up. Deadline: February. So, the EC still has two months to fix some of the glitches. But the overall manner in which the exercise is being conducted—almost by trial and error if not hit and miss—raises troubling questions about the integrity of the process and the final outcome.
The SIR in West Bengal has already been marred by deaths caused allegedly by "SIR stress". Mamata Banerjee has alleged that there were 39 such victims and promised Rs 2 lakh as compensation to their next of kin from the state's coffers. Some political rivals did snigger that "SIR stress" was merely a politically ploy to thwart the SIR. But when SIR staff began to die in other states, too—Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Kerala—they piped down.
There was no escaping the glaring reality of flaws in the EC's modus operandi. The EC is possibly beginning to recognise that reality. It has extended the time frame for the first phase of the SIR in West Bengal from December 4 to 11.
Block Level Officers (BLOs) tasked with distributing, collecting and uploading enumeration forms now have an extra week to finish their task. At a video conference this Friday, the EC asked CEOs of all states conducting the SIR to seek extensions of deadlines if needed. Most significantly, in perhaps a reluctant hat tip to Mamata Banerjee, the EC now says it will consider compensation to BLOs who died once post mortem reports come in. Earlier, no such provision was known to exist.
It is also possibly dawning on the EC that the SIR is not a one size fits all straitjacket that it can uniformly deploy in all states. Certainly, it should have closely examined West Bengal, which is exceptional on many counts. The most obvious is that it has an international porous land border unlike any other state currently undergoing SIR.
What also should have made the EC tread with care is the nature of its politics where a single party dominates the landscape, and has done so for 15 years. Finally, the EC should have donned specially crafted kid gloves to handle master politician Mamata Banerjee.
Ghost voters
EC officials in New Delhi examining data uploaded from West Bengal spotted a curious anomaly earlier this week. The state has 80,000 plus polling booths. A set of 2208 booths reported zero "uncollectable" entries. What that implies is, in these booths, every voter was accounted for with no deaths, no duplicates, no permanently shifted electors, and no untraceable voters reflected in the forms.
It is highly unusual for such a large number of booths to return such flawless data, the EC noted and ordered a review under the watch of superior officers. Less than 48 hours later, the number of booths reporting zero uncollectable forms came down from 2208 to a meagre seven. The BLOs who had uploaded the 100 per cent forms suddenly discovered dead people, married people and people who had just disappeared.
To say this magical modification has raised eyebrows is an understatement. The Opposition suggests the "error" was no oversight but mala fide strategy. The intent: leave in the names of dead or shifted voters so that false votes could be cast against their names on polling day.
The leader of opposition, BJP MLA Suvendu Adhikari, has made several dramatic claims—including that members of the TMC and poll strategy group IPAC were pressuring BLOs to let the names of dead voters stay on the rolls. He has demanded 1.25 crore enumeration forms uploaded between November 26 and 28 be audited by trained technical staff as the short span of time in which they were uploaded was dubious.
As proof, he shared some unverified audio clips and WhatsApp chat screenshots. Nothing concrete. But the EC is perhaps not turning a deaf ear.
'Scientific rigging'
West Bengal is familiar with the term 'scientific rigging'. The CPM was often accused by Mamata Banerjee of mastering the art in 34 years, manipulating voter rolls for guaranteed victory. No CPM leader will admit any such thing today. But the EC would have been well advised to have taken a crash course in West Bengal's political peculiarities before the SIR.
The BJP in West Bengal has—or had—great expectations of the SIR, that it would rid the voter list of their favourite bugbear, the "ghuspeitiya" from across the border, knock off dead and false voters and give the state a clean list that would propel the BJP to power.
No saying what might happen next May. But for inexplicable reasons, this old saw just popped out on the page: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.