MUMBAI: The Maharashtra Congress submitted a letter with demands, concerns and suggestions to the State Chief Electoral Officer S Chokalingam on Thursday, asking the Election Commission to implement the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) drive in a fair and transparent manner.
The letter raises concerns that the votes of specific castes and communities are being deliberately excluded from the voting list, while in some states, serious irregularities have been reported in SIR drives.
“The SIR drive has been carried out just ahead of elections with a malicious intention of giving the upper edge to the ruling party. Therefore, the SIR drive in Maharashtra should be conducted with no hurry, in an impartial and fair way,” demanded Maharashtra Congress president Harshvardhan Sapkal.
Sapkal said that the SIR process in Maharashtra was previously conducted between 2002 and 2004 over a period of nearly 13 months without any haste or hurry.
“Now, after 25 years, with an increase of approximately 35 million voters, the process should be planned accordingly. Since there are no elections in Maharashtra in the next two to three years, it has enough time to carry out the SIR exercise in a fair manner,” said a Congress leader.
“Even if it takes two years, we prominent politicians have no objection. Besides, the caste census and SIR should not be carried out by the same officials or staff. One officer should be entrusted with one responsibility only, then only the respective officer will be able to give justice to their work,” the leader further said.
The letter also stated that the political party and its representatives should be provided with the authenticated SIR data in soft copy, OCR, and machine-readable formats, as well as hard copies.
The letter further stated that a time frame of at least seven should be allowed for voters to raise the objection and respond to the notices related to the SIR.
“The Booth Level Officers (BLOs) should not work under pressure from any individual, organisation, or political leader at all. A special drive should be conducted for the registration of Booth Level Agents (BLAs). And, the entire SIR data should be preserved for at least five years at the ERO and DEO levels and be made available to political parties as required,” reads the letter.
It further stated that the Form 7 applications should be strictly scrutinised and the lists of voters marked as ‘absent, shifted or dead’ (ASD) should be provided on time to recognised political parties at the polling booth level.