With the Punjab Assembly elections due in a few months, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has rolled out the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in the state. The state is set to publish the final electoral roll on October 1.
Even as the Punjab Chief Electoral Officer Anindita Mitra announced the rollout of the process to verify all voters from June 15 onwards, barring BJP, all other major political parties in the state have objected to the move.
Final electoral roll on Oct 1
The parties particularly questioned the timing of the SIR as it comes just ahead of the state assembly elections.
While Partap Singh Bajwa, Leader of Opposition, said the Bengal elections have already shown how the BJP-led Centre, in collusion with Election Commission of India (ECI) can influence electoral outcomes through questionable SIR exercise, and asked Congress booth-level workers to remain vigilant, Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader Bikram Singh Majithia too said the timing of the exercise raised a serious concern. In Amritsar, Majithia, said there were genuine apprehensions regarding deletion of votes that are not mapped and addition of votes, adding, “The right to vote will be taken away from genuine voters.”
The ruling Aam Aadmi Party has been very vociferously against the SIR. Just a few days ago, Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann and Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema had said that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was using the SIR as a tool for “vote management”. In a statement issued on Thursday, Cheema said the BJP wants to come to power by splitting the votes of Punjab’s people.
Mitra said she had convened an all-party meeting here on Thursday afternoon to do away with any misgivings of political parties related to the SIR. “This is not the first time the exercise is being conducted, it was earlier conducted in 2003. We have already done a pre-SIR mapping exercise where the voter list is being mapped against the voter list of 2003. As much as 83.69 per cent of the 2,14,57,160 voters have been mapped in the state, with the highest number of mapping being done in Mansa at 93 per cent,” she said.
“Before the SIR is rolled out, we will continue to map the voter lists. Even later, if the voters names do not surface in the list, the Booth Level Officers (BLOs) will be visiting door to door from June 25 to July 24, to verify the antecedents of voters,” she said, adding that the draft roll would be published on July 31, after which claims and objections can be raised till August 30.
Mitra said that the objective of the SIR was to include every eligible person in the electoral rolls and remove ineligible persons.
