The second round of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voters’ list is currently underway in 12 states, including Kerala. The Supreme Court has, for now, not granted Kerala government’s request to further extend the deadline for voters to submit their enumeration forms beyond December 18. Currently, fundamental discussions regarding the SIR process are still ongoing. During the parliamentary debate on electoral reforms, where Rahul Gandhi and other Opposition members raised several criticisms, Union Home Minister Amit Shah made an unusually forceful remark, saying that the government would “detect, delete, and deport” illegal immigrants. The purpose of the SIR process is understood to be to clean up the voter list by removing the names of the deceased, those who have moved residences, and those with duplicate entries, thereby preparing a new list containing only genuine voters. Naturally, the process will also exclude non-citizens. However, Amit Shah’s focus was entirely on “illegal immigrants". It is evident that the term primarily refers to refugees who migrated from Bangladesh and those who arrived from Myanmar seeking asylum.
The Constitution envisions that the Election Commission of India is to function independently of the executive. However, what we see today is its functioning in line with the wishes of the ruling establishment. Since the SIR process inevitably involves factors that border on citizenship verification, it could end up becoming an exclusion exercise that the BJP government desires. This criticism had been raised earlier and even brought before the Supreme Court, but no effective remedy emerged. In the end, the only concession made through the apex court verdict was permitting Aadhaar to be used as an additional identification documen - not as proof of citizenship - along with the existing eleven ID documents. If the Election Commission is the authority responsible for conducting the SIR, then there is no reason for Amit Shah to be so excited about it. Yet the Home Minister appeared in Parliament on Tuesday as the overall champion of the “three-D” programme—detecting, deleting, and deporting those deemed ineligible. Shah’s performance made it clear that the Union government is one hundred per cent involved in this endeavour undertaken now by the current Election Commission.
How can a commission appointed entirely according to the government’s wishes act as a neutral umpire in matters of elections? As we have repeatedly pointed out, the flaws in the appointment process of the Election Commission itself are the root cause of this problem. In a three-member selection committee, if the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and a Union Minister decide on something together, how can the Leader of the Opposition alone influence that decision? When Rahul Gandhi raised this obvious question, the reply given by Amit Shah was riddled with sophistry meant to mislead. Shah argued that earlier the Opposition had no voice in the appointment, whereas now it has a 33 per cent voice. But contrary to what Shah suggested, earlier it was not the government but the President acting on the government’s recommendation, who appointed the Election Commission. The situation then was not like today; the Commission could, and used to maintain a great extent of neutrality. Indian democracy also has a proud history of figures like T.N. Seshan, who even made governments tremble. It was only when fairness and transparency in the Commission’s functioning began to erode that the Supreme Court intervened in 2023. That was when neww legislation was made forming the present selection panel model. Who does not know that a single vote out of three cannot make a difference in the present system? If the government at least had the practice of trying to reach unanimous decisions after listening to the one-third voice, it would have made some sense. But at the national level today, decisions are taken under a style of governance in which not a single voice from the Opposition is heard.
Instead of a mechanism with the onus of proving that a person is not a citizen, the present situation envisages that citizens themselves must produce documents to prove their citizenship. And as a result of mismanagement of illegal immigration, it a large sections of ordinary people who end up paying the price for the state’s own failures. During the citizenship protests, Amit Shah repeatedly claimed that the process was meant to grant citizenship, not take it awa from those who had it. But what happens when citizens themselves are first seen as non-citizens and then forced into hardship just to establish whether they are citizens or not? The intentions of the Sangh Parivar are evident to anyone. To safeguard the continuity of India’s unique democratic structure, democratic and civil rights activists must be prepared to confront this question as warranted.