CHENNAI: Among all the political parties, the ruling DMK, with its strong organisational base at grassroots level, has been the most visible one on the ground, proactively participating in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. The party’s legal wing had organised periodic training programmes for all its booth -level agents, sensitising them on the process and their tasks.
A day after the release of draft SIR rolls that showed 97.4 lakh names have been removed, TNIE spoke to DMK’s legal wing secretary, Rajya Sabha member and senior advocate NR Elango.
Excerpts
About 97.37 lakh voters have been removed in the draft roll despite DMK’s efforts on the ground. How do you see it?
SIR is a three-phase process. Only the enumeration phase is over. BLAs and booth committee members of our party did an excellent job on the ground in helping the people fill and submit the enumeration forms based on the 2002 and 2005 (previous SIR) voters’ lists. There are a lot of issues with this draft roll. For instance, a Madurai High Court Additional Public Prosecutor’s name was deleted, marking him as ‘dead’.
Hence, the real task for our booth committees has actually begun today (December 20). They are going to verify each and every deleted voter. If there are issues, our BLAs will take it up with the election officials concerned. Since each BLA has to cover just 1,200 voters, they will be able to do it along with the booth committee members over the next couple of weeks.
They will check the ‘dead’ category and will also try to contact those whose names were removed under ‘shifted category’ to check whether they have enrolled wherever they are residing at present.
The deletions in draft roll in Tamil Nadu are high compared to Bihar. What do you think is the reason?
During Bihar SIR, they collected documents (for proof) along with the enumeration forms. However, in our state, they collected only the enumeration forms. Hence, those whose names are not there in the draft electoral roll can now submit any one of the 13 accepted documents as proof and get their names included.
Rate of removal was more in Chennai than other districts. How do you see it?
Metropolitan cities usually have more floating population than mofussil areas. Cities like Chennai see large number of people going to their native places over a period due to various reasons. Even after shifting, their votes might have remained in the roll. That is the reason Chennai recorded more removals.
What is DMK going to do about those whose names have featured in the draft roll but marked as ‘not mapped’? It is said there could be 57 lakh voters under this category.
This is the area we are concentrating on now. These votes can be included in the final roll by submitting one of the 13 documents. Our party BLA will help them in this process. I hope most of these ‘not mapped’ votes can be included. If we do it successfully, the number of removals will come down significantly from the current 97.37 lakh.
What if eligible voters cannot get their names included even during the claims and objections phase?
We can have two appeals. One to the district election officer and then to the chief electoral officer. We will take all the efforts to get their names included. We will ensure all the eligible persons get their voting rights. That is our leader CM MK Stalin’s instruction to us.
