Kabil Sibal urged to prove his eligibility to vote: questions EC’s SIR verification
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The Election Commission notice urging him to prove his eligibility to vote, despite his enumeration details matching the 1998 voter record and the same having been attested by the booth-level officer during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Delhi, prompted Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal to question the ECI on why he was placed in the unmapped category and sent a notice.
Sibal raised the question to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at a press conference on Sunday about the notice being issued to him, while all the details as required by the EC were in order, and cited the mismatch between his name and his father’s name in the current electoral roll and those appearing in the rolls prepared during the previous SIR, which the EC’s notice cited as the reason for asking him to prove his eligibility.
“How is it that my notice has been sent to me in the unmapped category?” Sibal asked, adding, “Am I not a citizen of this country?”
He also said he had not received a physical copy of the notice, and argued that his case raised wider questions about the manner in which the revision was being conducted, while expressing his concerns over the non-intimation of the notice and the failure to notice similar notices, which could lead to the removal of his name from the electoral rolls.
Sibal is among 33 lakh electors in Delhi who have been issued notices seeking proof of their eligibility to vote. The notices account for nearly one-third of the 97.5 lakh electors included in the draft electoral rolls, while verification of the cases is scheduled to be completed by October 29 and the final rolls are due to be published on November 4.
Several prominent figures have also appeared on the list, including External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta, Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal and Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu.
According to an analysis by Hindustan Times, 42% of the notices were issued because voters could not be mapped to the previous SIR, while 41% involved discrepancies in names. A further 16% concerned age discrepancies, and 59,791 notices did not specify a reason.
The Election Commission, however, said receiving a notice did not mean that a voter’s name would be deleted, but defended the system-generated notices, saying that they would be issued where electors could not be linked to the previous SIR rolls or where such linking contained “logical discrepancies”.