THE VANISHING ELECTORATE

Procedural gaps have made the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision vulnerable to being labelled as disenfranchisement by design

- BY KANU SARDA AND BADAR BASHIR

FOR 40-YEAR-OLD Savita Devi of Amor, Bihar, the right to vote feels as though it is slipping through her fingers. Twice she walked to the booth-level officer's desk, clutching every document she could find— Aadhaar, ration card, electricity bills— and twice she returned home as if invisible. When the Election Commission's draft voter list was published, her name was still missing.

Savita Devi is not alone. Across Bihar are others fighting an almost absurd battle for their official existence. Two such people even stood before the Supreme Court on August 12—alive and breathing, yet officially dead according to the draft voter list. Psephologist Yogendra Yadav, appearing in person before the court, called this “just the tip of the iceberg”. What troubled him most, he said, was an unprecedented trend: more women voters have been struck off than men.

In Amor block, with about two lakh voters, a local party leader said around 40,000 voters were deleted from the list. “There are also those missing in the list under migrated category who have married [mostly women] in another block, and their name is not in any list," said the leader.

The numbers from Amor are a part a much larger churn. Nationwide, the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has removed about 65 lakh names from draft rolls—an annual clean-up aimed at deleting duplicates, the deceased, and those who have shifted residence. But the process has made voters like Savita feel that they have been denied their most basic democratic right.