CITIZENSHIP ON TRIAL

The Election Commission's rushed verification of voters, just 4-6 months prior to the assembly polls, sparks fears of disenfranchisement, political bias and covert citizenship tests

- KAUSHIK DEKA and AMITABH SRIVASTAVA

Eight-thirty am on July 6 should have been a drowsy Sunday morning, the hour when rural Bihar typically stirs to the hum of kettles and the rustle of early chores. Yet, at Baldeva High School in Danapur, nestled in rural Patna district, the atmosphere inside the large conference room was brisk, animated and alert. Some 50 voters, and an equal number waiting outside, overwhelmingly women from modest rural backgrounds, stood in line clutching their Aadhaar cards and, in many cases, their husbands' voter IDs, their expressions a mix of confusion and cautious hope.

Seated at a round table, five Booth Level Officers (BLOs), each flanked by at least one assistant, methodically pored over forms, scanning documents and cross-verifying entries against the electoral rolls. Two supervisors hovered nearby, observing the quiet precision of the choreography. Once done at this camp, which they expected to achieve by 12:30 pm, the BLOs would hit the road again, reaching out to houses across rural Patna, continuing the door-to-door verification process.

Armed with thick registers and pre-printed forms, they are among the nearly 100,000 BLOs embarked on an extraordinary mission since June 25: to verify the citizenship credentials of every one of Bihar's 79 million voters in just 31 days. A day earlier, the Election Commission of India (ECI) had launched what it called a Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, setting off a political firestorm that may soon engulf the nation's democratic machinery.