Let no Bihari voter be left behind

ACROSS Punjab this weekend, a sigh of relief has swept farms and factories and homes where Bihari migrant labour is employed, over Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Joymalya Bagchi’s remarks to the Election Commission (EC) that it should also allow the use of the Aadhaar, ration and voter ID cards — so that all Biharis can breathe easy when they queue up to vote in the Bihar election later this November.

To say that Punjab — and Haryana and Himachal Pradesh and the rest of the country — has a direct stake in the Bihar election is to state the obvious. Biharis — as well as those from Uttar Pradesh — are a common sight across North India. They till the fields that largely belong to ethnic Punjabis. They work in towns and cities and perform all the chores that Punjabis once did before they discovered Canada. Despite Sukhpal Khaira’s untenable remarks about them, we cannot do without them.

That’s why we should have paid far greater attention to what Justices Dhulia and Bagchi said in the Supreme Court two days ago. Which is, that if India is to continue to be the mother of all democracies — which it has striven to be since the first electoral exercise in 1951, in the wake of a bloody Partition — then it must allow all Biharis above the age of 18 to vote, as they have all these decades.

It boggles the mind why the EC would announce a special intensive revision of the Bihar poll rolls as late as June 24. Some say the EC was provoked into doing so by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s scathing piece in the Indian Express about how the “election was stolen” in Maharashtra. (Amongst other parameters, Gandhi said, the BJP won 89 per cent of the seats it contested, while it had only won 32 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha polls four months before.) Others believe the timing was purely coincidental. In any case, it came like a bolt from the blue.

Perhaps the EC believed it was high time. That the last time a revision of the Bihar poll rolls had been done was back in 2003 and as many as five Lok Sabha polls had taken place since. Now was as good a time as any to update and fix all omissions and commissions.

In which case, why slap such prohibitive conditions on the updation process? First, to banish Aadhaar, the voter ID (which the EC had itself issued) as well as the ubiquitous ration card, didn’t make sense. Second, to demand of Bihar’s 7.89 crore electorate, elaborate information like “documentary evidence” of place of birth of father and mother, sounded suspiciously like the EC was demanding proof of citizenship. Third, the EC announced that it would publish the updated draft electoral rolls on August 1, which meant that Biharis had about five weeks to get their information together.

How was that going to be possible if large numbers of Biharis were toiling away in Punjab’s fields or on construction sites in Maharashtra? Were they going to drop their toil and rush to the nearest cyber café and check if their names were on the list? That’s when a variety of upstanding folk, including organisations like the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) as well as politicians like Manoj Kumar Jha (full disclosure : he writes in The Tribune) and Mahua Moitra, decided to file a flurry of petitions in the Supreme Court.

The SC, rightfully so, has not halted the exercise. Besides suggesting the addition of three more documents for validation, in addition to the 11 already cited by the EC, the SC has asked several more questions, including, ‘Does the EC have the power to ask proof of citizenship of voters?’

This question, as to who is an Indian and who isn’t, has been around for several decades. Since the Foreigners Act was passed in 1946 — which gave the state, in the run-up to the Partition, the power to detain and deport illegal immigrants — to the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019, the state has attempted to define and classify the status of those living in India. (Assam, bordering Bangladesh, has borne the brunt of several exercises of citizenship over the decades, including the National Register of Citizenship, which was quietly buried in 2019 when 19 lakh people were found outside the register.)

Of course, the EC special intensive revision is not asking any Bihari to prove whether she is Indian or not — what she is being asked to prove is whether she’s Bihari and can, therefore, vote in the Bihar election. Like Assam, Bihar also neighbours a foreign country, Nepal, but the ‘roti-beti rishta’ between the two and the open border ensures amity, rather than tension.

Still, Opposition parties are worried. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has accused the EC of “acting like a stooge of the BJP.” Trinamool Congress leaders say the “real target” is West Bengal and its large undocumented migrant population, when it goes to the polls less than a year from now.

Bihar politicians fear something more insidious. Besides Punjab and Maharashtra’s seasonal labour, who may not be able to prove their bonafides in time for the all-important election in November, millions of under-privileged Biharis living at home may also not be smart enough to do so. Asaduddin Owaisi, whose party won five seats in the Seemanchal area last time, believes he could be squarely hit.

As for Rahul Gandhi’s criticism of the EC, the fact is that the Congress leader has won no general election under his leadership. But his determined wagging of a copy of the Constitution wherever he goes, nevertheless stirs the vague reminder that alongside our “secular and socialist” inheritance, we, the people, must exercise our due responsibility to stay in the driver’s seat.

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