Subject of contentious litigation, SIR fails to move Bihar voters

Unsar (Muzaffarpur):  Outside a house painted a light green sitting just off the highway, Nagini Khatoon explains how her household with 17 registered voters is often wooed by contestants in local body elections. “They come and says take some money. They are aware that there are so many voters here. But we have never let anything influence our vote,” she says and asks a younger son to call for his older brother to step out for a moment to meet the visitors who have stopped outside their house.

Mohammad Ijaz is running a tailoring unit in Ahmedabad and a couple of his brothers also work with him. The brothers, along with others who work elsewhere, are home with their families to vote in the November 6 first round of voting in Bihar. Unsar is part of the Bochahan assembly seat and the family, including Nagini Khatoon’s ailing husband who does not get around much, is set to vote for the Mahagathbandan. “Yes, we are supporting Tejashwi ji for chief minister,” says Ijaz.

Given the large size of the family group with most male members – some with their families -- living in other states did the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of the voter list pose any problems? “No, we had no trouble, no one was deleted from the list,” says Khatoon with Ijaz and another son Mohammad Sarfraz agreeing. No one in the populous village with a couple of hundred Muslim households reported a problem and they were now set to vote.

“The sons come back home for marriages or elections. This time their was a marriage as well,” says Nagini, who comes across as a cheery matron. In villages and small, crowded towns that dot Bihar’s rural landscape, it is hard to come across any significant complain about the SIR which has been subject to high-profile litigation and was the central theme of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s “vote chori (vote theft)” campaign in the state prior to election in which he was joined by Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) Tejashwi Yadav.

Importantly, even key voter blocks such as Muslims and Yadavs supporting the grand alliance do not have much to say about the SIR. Though critical of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Janata Dal (U)-led alliance, and willing to support the charge that the ruling regime’s actions are biased, they do not report being inconvenienced despite the INDIA bloc’s claims that the election watchdog is working in cahoots with BJP to delete “opposition” votes on the pretext of cleaning up voter lists. In fact, SIR hardly ever figures in conversations about issues being discussed in the election where gripes about local-level corruption ranks far higher on the grouse list.

Voters in rural India – more so than urban electors – are keenly conscious about their vote. If the SIR had indeed resulted in problems, any visitor to these parts would have been made aware of it. The theme of “vote chori” is blended with the suggestion that one of the objectives of the exercise – to remove illegal migrants from the voter list – is aimed at disenfranchising Muslims. The subtext being that the aim to identify illegals, primarily Bangladeshis, is a bid to deplete the ranks of anti-BJP voters. The theme might find ready resonance with many Muslim voters but when asked about their individual experience, most do not have a complaint about the EC.

Chhabilapur village in the Nalanda assembly constituency lies on the Patna-Rachi highway and as the day draws to a close, a group of farmers sitting at a local shop, a majority of them Yadavs, argue vehemently in favour of “badlav (change” and find some support from a few others in their midst. They are very worked up about the murder of Dularchand Yadav, a strongman working for the Jan Suuraj Party in Mokamma, pointing out that this was the “real” jungle raj as the accused was JD(U) candidate Anant Singh. But on questions about SIR, their response was cursory, indicating that the issue did not rank in their priorities.

The responses from other communities are on similar lines with the SIR not seen to have posed more than a few requirements, particularly for those who are working and living outside Bihar. In most cases of migrant workers, their families have supplied the documents or the voters concerned have sent them over mobile phones for submission. At the end of the exercise, the number of deleted voters outside of the three principal causes for removal – death, permanently shifted and duplicate entries – is barely 10,000. In fact, by this count, very few “illegals” have been weeded.