There have been many alarming reports from all over the country about the exclusion of Muslim voters from the electoral rolls. The geographical spread and frequency of such reports lead to only one conclusion that there is deliberate attempt to reduce the number of Muslim voters in order to erode their electoral weightage and, correspondingly, increase the weightage of the ‘Hindu’ votes which are likely to be cast for the BJP in the coming elections.
The reports are not confined to the border districts which are said to be infiltration prone. Even in the capital more than a lakh Muslim voters have been branded as Bangladeshis and excluded from the electoral rolls under pressure from the BJP. In the recent Lok Sabha election in Patna, it was a common experience for the Muslim voters to find that their names did not figure in the electoral rolls. Similarly, in many other constituencies/booths of Muslim concentration, the Muslim voters face a similar situation. Generally speaking, the electoral rolls belie their own estimate of their electoral strength in the constituency.
Right to vote: Basis of Democracy several factors have combined to produce this situation, which cuts at the very root of the democratic System because there cannot be any higher democratic right than the right 1o vote. All over the world, the minority groups jealously guard their right to vote, and depending upon their level of political consciousness, their polling average is also higher than the overall average. In India, in the absence of legislative reservation or separate electorate, the constituencies with at least 2025% of the total votes become even more important for the minority groups because only in such constituencies candidates belonging the minority groups may be elected. In a segmented society like India’s, where every social group largely tends to vote as a group and for a candidates of its own, if he has a winning chance, disenfranchisement has both a positive and a negative effect and distorts the working of the democratic and the electoral system Electoral Calculation.
Although the electoral authorities do not provide the breakup of the total electorate in any constituency by social groups, every serious candidate or his electoral agents calculate their chance to win by analyzing the social composition of the electorate and by estimating the percentage of each social group which may exorcist its franchise in his favor or against him. In fact the analysis is made right down to the booth level, where even the polling agents are selected with an eye on the social grip which are more favorably inclined than the others. Revision a routine formality Over a period of time, the revision of electoral roll has become a routine formality. The enumerator picks up the last roll for the booth, makes perfunctory equines, deletes the names of some electors who have died since the last revision and adds the names of those who come forward for inclusion on the ground of having attained the voting age of having moved from another electoral area. The political parties generally ignore the process since none of them has any interest in the inclusion of all the voters.
The enumerator himself faces no punishment or penalty for deleting the names which are to be included or including the names which are to be deleted. The Assistant Electoral Registration Officer (AERO) or the Electoral Registration (ERO) Officer does not have the lime even to make a random or spot check of the draft rolls. Officially the draft rolls are made available at every booth but in fact they are not. And where is the conscious elector who is anxious to check whether his name figures in the draft rolls and take the trouble to fill form6 to have his name included? The elector who is concerned with the sanctity of the electoral roll and wants the name of a dead person to be deleted or of an eligible person included is still rarer. In any case, the women voters would not know, the illiterate voters would not have the capacity, the literate voters would not have the time and the draft roll, on completion of the presented period, becomes final and the final roll is published, with all the omissions and inaccuracies. Political Polarization.
So long as the process, howsoever inadequate, was politically neutral, it did not really matter but with growing political polarization based on religion and caste, and even language and race, the electoral roll had assumed much greater importance in the political scheme of things. That is why, began in Assam in the early 80°s the phenomenon of an organized campaign to reduce the voting strength of the religious and linguistic minorities in order to make Assam safe for the Assamese and to ensure their political dominance, at a time when they felt that they were being reduced to a minority in their own State by the overwhelming and increasing presence of the non-Assamese. Since the axe first falls on the weak branch, the Muslim minority of Bengali extraction became the natural target. The Hindu Bengalis were protected’ because they were Hindu refugees, despite economic and cultural conflict of interest. The tribals which had a majority in their own areas of concentration could not be excluded; The Muslim concentration areas became the arena. An effective combination of the political forces led by the AASU and the bureaucracy, largely manned by the Assamese from top to bottom, and the Police excluded lakhs of voters at will, practically without any hearing and without any appeal, on the Presumption that they were all illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or immediate descendants thereof. In the name of the sanctity of the electoral system, arbitrary procedures were devised which authorized the Executive to declare a Person whose ancestors had been living in Assam for generations or who was citizen by birth as illegal immigrant, only because he was a Bengali speaking Muslim, Intensive Revision in Assam Although an intensive revision was carried out in Assam in 1990, and elections were held on the basis of the 1990 rolls, another Intensive Revision with 1193 as the date of reference with house-to-house enumeration without reference to 1990 rolls, has been ordered by the Election Commission, the arbitrary procedure imposed on an unwilling state government contains many legal lacunae as well as ignores many practical difficulties, But one point has been admitted that the enumerator cannot, on his own, omit to record the physical presence of a person who is prima facie eligible to be a elector, He may however, prepare a separate list of those whom he suspects to be illegal immigrants, and submit it to the Electoral Registration Officer who, in turn, transmits it to the District Magistrate for verification, Whether the District Magistrate has the legal authority to declare any person who claims to be a citizen and, therefore, a voter, a foreigner is open to question. But what is worse no District Magistrate can deal with thousands of ‘suspects’ and certify in good faith that some of them are illegal immigrants or foreign nationals not entitled to vote. In any case, he has very meagre information at his command on a very limited number of individuals. How can he come to a conclusion without evidence?
..And in Delhi
The procedure adopted in New Delhi in respect of 173 booths in 13 pockets spread over 12 Assembly constituencies is yet more bizarre. The police identified certain areas as having a high concentration of foreign nationals. No one knows the basis of such a conclusion. The electoral authorities decided to nullify the draft rolls of those areas altogether as if the enumeration had not been done or if done, had found all persons residing in those areas as foreigners ineligible for inclusion. Possible electors were than invited to apply for registration. Not many knew of the new procedure or were conscious enough to take time off, obtain the form, fill it, get it endorsed by another elector and submit it personally to the authorities in time and respond to hearings and interrogation. The result was that more than 1,20,000 electors were excluded, vast majority of them being Muslims. Some of them speak Bengali because they have migrated from West Bengal but there are migrants from other States as well, A few of them could be Bangladeshis but in order to exclude those few, hundreds of thousands of citizens belonging to # particular community who have migrated to Delhi from various parts of the country and speak different languages have been disenfranchised, Could there be a worse act of arbitrariness and injustice?
With growing communal! polarization the enumerators cannot be trusted to be impartial and, therefore, in the process of enumeration they tend to omit not only individuals from particular social groups but even localities, Mohall’s, and villages where members of the target group are concentrated.
Similarly, the Executive and the Police which have the defacto authority to decide on the national or citizenship status of individuals on the spot, not only harass them but summarily disenfranchise them just because they belong to a particular social group. Therefore, the basic premise behind every administrative directive that it shall be applied uniformly and impartially does not exist. Moreover, is unfair and oppressive to treat all members of a social groups suspect and to make them undergo a special time, energy and money consuming procedure, only to establish their birth right. If the democratic system is to Survive, the question of nationality or citizenship must, therefore, be decided by a judicial or a quasijudicial authority on the basis of evidence placed before it by the authority which questions the citizenship status claimed.
To mitigate the hardship, the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983 was promulgated and enforced in Assam. Under the Tribunals Act only those persons who are prima facie suspected to be illegal migrants and whose cases have been investigated by the competent authority are placed before the Tribunals. Tribunals are the names of those who are found to be foreign nationals and citizens by the Tribunal are then deleted from the rolls.
Laws should be amended In fact, the rules governing the registration of electors do not vest any authority in the enumerator or the electoral registration officers to deny registration to any person who claims to be a citizen and the process of electoral revision, therefore, cannot be, and should not be, used for the detection and identification of illegal immigrants, Delectation and identification can be done separately under the appropriate laws. And at any time when a person is found to be a foreign national or an illegal immigrant, his name can be communicated by the administrative or the judicial authority to the E.R.O. for deletion. The two parallel processes, the first of revision which is periodical in character and the other of detection which can be continuous should not be confused or intertwined with each other. There is also a case for amending the Foreigner’s Act so that in accordance with the principles of natural justice and of general jurisprudence the burden of proof should not be on the person who is alleged to be a foreign national but on the authority or the person which makes the allegation, Secondly, the electoral registration mules should also be changed to prescribe a penalty for deliberate Omission Of persons or areas in the Process of enumeration. Thirdly, the list of documents which can be produced as evidence of citizenship or residence in order to rebate the allegation should be enlarged, since there is no compulsory registration of binhs in our country nor do all electors possess any property or hold any employment. Moreover, to enable such persons have ready and easy access to the judicial forum, the cases should be heard by mobile courts or Tribunals so that they can be decided at the Panchayat, block or municipal level. Rule of target groups.
While the laws, the rules, the regulations and even the procedures need to be revised in order to protect the voting right of the citizen, the target groups must also share the responsibility. For example, in the case of the Muslim community, nonpolitical Muslim organizations like the JamiatiUlemaiHind, the JamaateIslamiHind or local Anjumans or Committees should, in order to oversee the process of revision, establish a chain of voluntary groups going down {o each booth to check that every elector is duly enumerated and included m the draft rolls, to assist illiterate electors and 10 motivate the literate. At the district level the process must be monitored so that no names are arbitrarily struck off without a definite finding by a competent authority on the national status. Copies of Form 6 may be distributed right down to the booth level so that many eligible voter whose name has been left out can apply for inclusion within the prescribed time and their progress may be overseen so that the forms are not filed away or ignored but they are duly processed and decided by the competent authority and the names of those found eligible are added to the draft rolls before publication.
Apex Muslim organizations like the All India Muslim MajliseMushawarat or the newly formed All India Mille Council should give due priority to this new threat to the Muslim community and establish Muslim Voters Council at the national, state, district and block/municipal levels, Below the Block/ municipal level, for every Panchayat or Ward there should be a group of dedicated youth voluntarily supervising the process of enumeration and enrollment.
The Voters Councils at the national and the State level must also keep an eye on the directive issued by the Election Commission of India or the State Election Office, whose constitutionality and legality may be checked by means of test cases filed before the High Court and the Supreme Court, if necessary. The Councils should also bring cases of deliberate and massive exclusion to the attention of the secular parties’ at various levels chauvinist Attack.
The Chauvinist Forces led by the Sangh Parivar have adopted large scale disenfranchisement of the Muslim community as a strategic objective. Since the Muslim community cannot be physically liquidated nor wished away nor thrown into the sea, their objective is poetical liquidation which is a workable option, if the Muslim community and the secular Parties continues to ignore the situation.
Massive disenfranchisement is a more lethal weapon Against the Muslim Indians then the occasional Programs. And more effective, because Killings outrage human conscience in India and abroad and disenfranchisement goes unnoticed even by the victim, until} the next elections, and, that 100, only if he is politically conscious. And because disenfranchisement can lead to enslavement.
(Syed Shahabuddin, Courtesy of Muslim India).
Article extracted from this publication >> August 6, 1993
