NEW DELHI: CPI-ML (Liberation) general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya on Tuesday sought withdrawal of special intensive revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls in Bihar. He said that the decision is arbitrary and utterly ill-planned.
The Left party further urged the Election Commission of India (ECI) to conduct the polls on the basis of normal updating of the electoral roll as has been done in every election over the last two decades.
"The focus must be on facilitating electors in the exercise of their franchise and not creating difficulties and excluding electors from the election process. The more the ECI seeks to provide clarification about the Special Intensive Revision of the Electoral Roll in Bihar, the more confusing and misleading it gets," he said.
Bhattacharya further questioned why the ECI is now trying to trivialise the SIR by saying rolls are revised annually.
He said that the last time a Special Intensive Revision was conducted was 22 years ago. It is certainly not a routine annual exercise, he added.
"Only citizens are entitled to vote, but never before in India were electors asked to prove their citizenship. The onus was on the state to prove otherwise. Now every elector is being doubted and asked to prove his or her citizenship with the help of documents that many in India still do not possess," he alleged.
He stated that it is the state's responsibility to register every birth. "No birth becomes invalid because of non-registration. Rather than asking people to excavate past records, let the state ensure universal registration of births and deaths to ensure automatic updating of records," Bhattacharya added.
The CPI-ML (Liberation) leader also questioned the sudden announcement of the revision. "The ECI offers no explanation as to why it had no prior consultation with any political party before launching the SIR? Why was it announced all of a sudden? When demonetisation or Notebandi was announced all on a sudden the government said it wanted to catch black money holders unawares. Why did the ECI want to catch voters off guard?," he said.
