On the day of the Baisakhi festival in 1919, there was a young man named Nanak Singh among the hundreds of Indians who had gathered at Jallianwala Bagh with a burning desire for freedom and who survived the massacre carried out by General Dyer’s troops. Through his poem Khooni Vaisakhi, the freedom fighter told the world what had happened at Jallianwala Bagh. Nanak Singh was later imprisoned for his participation in the freedom struggle. The novels and stories he wrote both from the confines of British imperial prisons and from the soil of independent India made Nanak Singh one of the most popular writers in the Punjabi language. His grandson, too, is a well-known figure, though perhaps not as famous as Nanak Singh himself. Navdeep Singh Suri, who served in the Indian Foreign Service, was India’s envoy in countries including Egypt, the UAE, South Africa and Austria. A literary enthusiast, Suri translated several of Nanak Singh’s works, including Khooni Vaisakhi into English. After serving as an ambassador and upholdingIndia’s position on the international stage, he retired from service and began expressing his views openly on various social issues. He has raised his voice against communal polarisation and genocides that result in the killing of people. Now, the citizenship of Navdeep Singh Suri, a descendant of a freedom fighter and a former representative of India in various countries, has itself been cast under a cloud of doubt by the Election Commission’s SIR (Special Intensive Revision) process. After submitting all the documents through the Booth Level Officer (BLO) and ensuring that everything was in order, Suri received a message stating that the details did not match the records from 2003. Suri asks the Central Election Commission: if he, who represented India in various countries, has to face so many hurdles to prove his citizenship, what must be the situation of ordinary citizens?
The experience faced by Navdeep Singh Suri can reasonably be suspected to be part of an attempt to extend to other poll-bound states the experiment carried out in Bengal, where the names of the families of renowned artist Nandalal Bose, who designed the original cover of the Indian Constitution, as well as Kargil War veteran Havildar Mohammad Dawood Ali and former The Telegraph editor R. Rajagopal, among others, were removed from the electoral rolls. Those who harbour such suspicions cannot be faulted. Punjab is set to go to the polls for its Legislative Assembly next March. Last month, a video emerged of a BJP woman leader in Punjab calling on party workers to get 20,000–25,000 votes deleted through the SIR and ensure the victory of their own MLA. In the draft electoral roll released by the Election Commission in the second week of August, 2.066 million voters have been excluded. If the time allowed for filing objections is merely intended to put on a farce, as in Bengal, it will serve no purpose.
Another state that is due to hold Assembly elections next year, Uttarakhand, is watching the SIR being turned into an overtly communal process under the leadership of the ruling BJP. BJP workers are reportedly filing Form 7 on a large scale in an effort to have the names of people associated with opposition parties removed from the electoral rolls. An analysis by the Sabar Institute, which exposed the SIR fraud in Bengal, shows that this is particularly widespread in districts with a higher Muslim population. In 45 of the state’s 70 Assembly constituencies, the number of votes sought to be deleted is higher than the winning candidate’s margin of victory in the last Assembly election. An investigation by Newslaundry.com points out that five BJP workers have submitted 6,500 objection applications across five constituencies. Although the Congress state unit has lodged a complaint with the Election Commission, the party's national leadership appears to have made no significant opposition to this mass deletion drive aimed at depriving citizens of their right to vote and, consequently, their civil rights. Even in Bengal, when the Sabar Institute and a few independent online media outlets closely analysed the SIR process and exposed irregularities, the opposition leadership maintained a similarly suspicious silence. It must be said that it is the small collectives exposing such deletions, along with civil rights activists and civil society organisations who approach the courts against this injustice and organising public campaigns, that keep democracy from being choked.