BENGALURU: Prashant Bhushan, a senior advocate at the Supreme Court, called the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to be the latest “weapon” in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) history trying to establish a “Hindu rashtra”.
Bhushan was the keynote speaker at a public seminar on the Delimitation Bill, the Women’s Reservation Bill and the SIR, held on Sunday. He said that SIR, in its current version, is a targeted exercise to disenfranchise the nation’s Muslim voters.
“When the BJP came to power, they said that they wanted a Hindu rashtra; but over time they realised that they could not amend the constitution to erode secularism and reduce Muslims and minorities to second class citizens. They tried to impose the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, but the Supreme Court intervened and stopped it from being used on a communal basis,” he said.
According to Bhushan, the arrival of SIR in the manner it did, clouded the transparency a fair election should have in the service of vested interests. “Since the time India’s first voter list was made in 1951, there was no requirement to fill an enumeration form even once.
The litany of documents required is extensive: we saw in Bihar that the percentage of the population that had even one of the required docs was less than 50%.” He continued to cite the West Bengal elections to be the starkest example of targeted exclusion, saying,
“They used the trick of ‘logical discrepancy’ like spelling errors. Only around 27% of West Bengal is Muslim; and yet, over one-thirds of the population deleted from the list was found to be Muslim. This targeting is deliberate, and is possible with the software that the Election Commission of India (ECI) uses.”
Bhushan said that the Delimitation Bill would introduce disparity and potentially disenfranchise Southern states of the country. “If the proposed delimitation bill is passed, Southern states with little population growth will lose a lot of seats and the balance of power will shift towards the North, where population has grown rampantly. They will be essentially penalising Southern states for conducting population control,” he said.
