Unkind cuts: On the Telangana and Karnataka electoral rolls

The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process being conducted by the Election Commission of India (ECI) is increasingly leading to a clear case of disenfranchisement in several parts of India. Marauding on after a judgment by the Supreme Court of India allowed it to proceed, the SIR has now struck out a fifth of the names from the electoral rolls in Telangana and Karnataka — nearly 22% and 19.5% respectively — and among the highest in the country. The cuts are steepest in their capital cities — five constituencies in Bengaluru have lost more than half of their electors while nine of Hyderabad’s 15 have seen deletions of more than 40%. Cuts of this kind cannot simply be a trimming of bloated rolls at the margins. If they are accurate, the ECI’s own summary revision processes were yielding bloated rolls in recent elections, and doing so in the very places with high net in-migration from the rest of India. And if the deletions are to be justified, those struck off the rolls must have left the States — a move within Karnataka or Telangana would only relocate a voter’s name on the same State roll, not remove it altogether. Yet, this is neither borne out by recent survey data nor by the government’s own population estimates.

During the Bihar SIR, the Court asked why political parties had filed so few objections, seeking inclusion of wrongly deleted names; that question might hold true for the Southern States as well. A plausible reason could be that the voter id is useful to a citizen only once in a few years, leading to less alacrity on their part. This may explain why a process that puts the onus on electors yields cuts of this scale. Meanwhile, proving a smoking gun in the data is difficult because of the ECI’s opacity. It has not published the elector-to-population ratio for any State so far during the revision even though doing so is mandatory and is the only test of under-enrolment. The Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer has not even bothered to release a gender-wise breakdown of the deletions, instead scattering the lists across several Google Drive links without the old booth numbers, making verification arduous. The outcome of such shoddiness is visible in West Bengal, where the ECI’s dubious “logical discrepancy” process disenfranchised lakhs of electors, forcing them to seek redress before tribunals set up under the aegis of the Court. Months after the elections, records obtained under a Right to Information request show that barely 82,000 of the nearly 38 lakh appeals before the 19 tribunals have been decided, with more than 90% of those decisions favouring electors seeking restoration. The ECI — an institution once envied even by wealthier democracies for bringing large numbers of Indians to the polling booth — is now an obstacle to universal adult franchise.