Bihar voter roll revision is assault on foundations of democracy, say 93 ex-bureaucrats

A group of 93 retired civil servants and diplomats, on Tuesday, called the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Bihar an “assault on the very foundations of our democracy”, referring to the right to vote.

“The assault is an insidious one where the purported attempt to clean up and sanitise the electoral rolls is likely to end up disenfranchising a very large segment of the voting population, particularly the poor and the marginalised,” the Constitutional Conduct Group said.

The group of former bureaucrats highlighted that a vast majority of the economically weaker sections of the population have held their right to vote as the “most fundamental stake in Indian democracy” because a liberal approach was followed to prepare electoral rolls, with the understanding that several Indians lack documentation to prove their citizenship.

“This process has now been reversed to ensure that those with poor access to documents will be deprived of their rights as voters,” the group contended.

The former bureaucrats argued that the exercise by the Election Commission allows it to effectively become a deciding authority on citizenship rights” without possessing the constitutional mandate to do so.

The exercise, under the guise of cleaning up voter lists, attempts to “introduce the contested idea of the NRC [National...

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