A straightforward if tedious bureaucratic exercise has animated Indian politics over the past six months. The currently ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in a dozen states and union territories demonstrates yet again that when it comes to matters of citizenship, even the simplest task in India is fiendishly complicated and contested.
The objectives behind SIRs are simple: adding new voters and checking whether existing registered voters continue to be eligible to vote in a given place. The central government has noted “rapid urbanisation, frequent migration, young citizens becoming eligible to vote, non-reporting of deaths and inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” as driving considerations behind the exercise.
This is unexceptionable. Or should be, if you discount your priors.
Start with the logistics. The Election Commission estimates SIRs will involve more than half a million “Booth Level Officers”. Known as BLOs, they will have to go door-to-door to hand out forms to registered and prospective voters. The filled forms will then have to be digitized and uploaded for final tabulation. All within a matter of a couple of months.
The challenges are obvious, especially for the BLOs who must gather – and in many cases, help fill – forms from households. They are public employees, many of them school teachers, who have been roped in for the exercise, as a matter of legal compulsion. They are to undertake this work above and beyond the responsibilities of their day jobs. The pressure on the BLOs over the past couple of months has cast a long shadow.
And then there is the question of documents that need to be submitted by voters to (re)establish their citizenship. Amid a pervasive culture of informality, especially among the rural poor, this can be a tall task. Even more fundamentally, SIR critics have questioned whether the Election Commission can, in fact, adjudicate citizenship as a matter of law.
Thanks to a porous border coupled with independent Bangladesh’s tumultuous political history, India has continued to witness a steady trickle of Bangladeshi migrants, lacking institutional mechanisms to tackle it.
While the SIRs are being carried out across the country, including in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat (both Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states), it is in West Bengal where the exercise has proved to be the most controversial. The state will go to the polls next year.
The BJP has maintained the need to create a National Register of Citizens (NRC), as prescribed through a 2003 amendment of the Citizenship Act. The issue blew up in 2019 when the government published a draft NRC for Assam (which, however, has not been officially adopted).
The Trinamool Congress – a powerful local party opposed to the BJP, and led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee – has described the SIR as implementing the NRC in West Bengal “through the backdoor”, and as a way to “strip Bengalis of their citizenship”. Between this, intemperate remarks by local BJP honchos, and rampant misinformation on social media, longtime residents now find themselves obsessing about the potential fallout of the exercise. Wild rumours about post-SIR “concentration camps” and such abound.
An astute populist once allied with the BJP, Banerjee understands the value of drumming up the SIR’s impact ahead of elections that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP desperately seeks to win. This is manifestly tactical. After all, earlier this year Bihar held elections following SIR there. And yet, data analysis shows the exercise did not impact the outcome, as another regional satrap found himself back in power.
Over the years, Banerjee has positioned herself as champion of Bengal’s syncretic culture. If she does manage to convince West Bengalis – Hindus and Muslims alike – the SIR was a direct assault on their identity, she, ironically, would almost certainly stand to benefit the most from the exercise, electorally. This is a possibility not lost to Modi.
Cut and thrust of local politics aside, the SIR controversy stands to obscure real challenges to India’s security.
India and Bangladesh share the world’s fifth longest land border. A key reason why India went to war in 1971 was to stem a serious inflow of refugees – almost ten million – from what was then East Pakistan, following a genocide. The impact then was pronounced in West Bengal, Assam and the broader Indian northeast.
As but one example, a bloody ethno-nationalist “agitation” – alongside a full-blown insurgency – in Assam in the early and mid 1980s can be traced back to the issue of illegal migration from Bangladesh. The agitation ended in 1985 only after a formal commitment by the centre to comprehensively address it. (The Modi government has maintained that an NRC for Assam is a Supreme Court-mandated consequence of this commitment.)
Thanks to a porous border coupled with independent Bangladesh’s tumultuous political history, India has continued to witness a steady trickle of Bangladeshi migrants, lacking institutional mechanisms to tackle it.
The overwhelming majority of these migrants want nothing more from their journey than to eke out a meagre living. Nevertheless, Indian security agencies have good reasons to be concerned. They are not alone in their assessment that the India-Bangladesh border, especially in Assam and West Bengal, continues to see a pronounced presence of transnational Sunni terrorist organisations. The Australian intelligence community, for example, concludes that one such (Bangladesh-centred) group’s “presence in India is symbolically important to its goal of developing a regional profile focused on a ‘prophesied war of India’”.
As the spectre of Islamist terrorism returns to South Asia, the state and the centre in India must be on the same page, even if it means jointly addressing politically fraught and uncomfortable questions. The SIR kerfuffle shows just how far this is from being the case.
