UP polls: The vanished minority voter

In 2019, a 'No Voter Left Behind' campaign found names of 12 crore Indians missing from electoral rolls, of whom four crore were Dalits and three crore Muslims

Travelling through Uttar Pradesh, I came across Indian citizens with voter identity cards who had failed to find their names in electoral lists.

Four days before voting in Moradabad, Sher Mohammad, who has voted in every recent election, was deeply upset. In his advanced years, he had been compelled to negotiate the internet as he was desperate to find his name in the lists, vote and assert his rights as a citizen. But his name had vanished from the electoral rolls, and even political workers of the leading opposition party in the state, the Samajwadi Party (SP), could not help him. Almost in tears was Wasim Akram, who had found only one name from his family of 10 in the voters' list.

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The story continued until I walked down to a street where an SP worker was distributing slips to potential voters. People were angry and upset and the man handing out the voting slips said in a recorded video that only 20 per cent of those coming to take the slips found their names. This was a Muslim dominated block of Moradabad, and 80 per cent of the names had not yet been found.

The implications are terrifying.

In 2019, a 'No Voter Left Behind' campaign found that the names of 12 crore Indians were missing from electoral rolls, of whom four crore were Dalits and three crore Muslims. This suggests that some of the weakest sections of society are being systematically excluded from the democratic process. The same year an app called 'Missing Voters' was also created by Khalid Saifullah of RayLabs Technologies to help disenfranchised voters.

These are good initiatives, but the larger question is how do people who have voted in the past find themselves missing from electoral lists? The innocent reasons can be that when the electoral rolls were revised, they were migrant workers, so the booth level officers (BLOs) tasked with the job did not find them at the given address, and hence they got left out. Here one of the critiques of the system is that electoral rolls are revised not by full-time employees dedicated to the job but by government teachers who can be careless or overburdened. In 2019, the 'No Voter Left Behind' campaign found the most troubling levels of exclusions in India's most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra.

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A more insidious reason for the exclusion of minority voters in Uttar Pradesh during the years of a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reign would be a deliberate attempt to change the electoral demography from the real demography. All that needs to be done by cadres or 'panna pramukhs' preparing for a campaign is to assess the voting choices around specific polling booths and then apply for the removal of particular names. At this point, the BLOs [Booth Level Officers] are expected to verify the facts, but again because they are not full-time employees, they frequently do not do the follow up, and the names are just removed. Hence the plight of Sher Mohammad and Wasim Akram and family.

In many cases, the BLO could be loyal to the ideology promoted by the establishment or would just be obeying instructions and would be happy to oblige in the process of removing Muslim names. In the case of Dalits, too, across India, this possibly happens from a certain prejudice that does not respect or care about the choices that voters from the community would be making.

Since the groundwork of the BJP is the most formidable in India, this potentially gives it a distinct advantage in closely fought elections in the states it rules. What is also disappointing is the lack of preparedness of many opposition candidates when it comes to these technical, bureaucratic aspects of the election process.

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For instance, when I confronted the current SP candidate for Moradabad City, Yusuf Ansari, with the question about missing voters, he said he had asked people to help out with laptops and technical assistance. But a query with a former election commissioner revealed that if a complaint is made with the Election Commission, it takes at least 7 to 10 days to verify. Therefore, by the time many voters headed out to get their voting slips, it was too late for them to vote anyway. What is required is a sustained awareness campaign months before voting. In the 2017 state polls, the same Yusuf Ansari incidentally lost the seat with a 47 per cent Muslim population to the BJP's Ritesh Gupta by a margin of 3000 votes. Both men head off again.

The last-minute distribution of tickets in many cases also limits the time an opposition candidate has to ensure that voters are registered on revised electoral rolls. The BJP, conversely, with its blueprints and cadre force intact, would potentially have its people on the rolls regardless of whether they change the candidate or not in Uttar Pradesh.

But the story of missing voters is much larger than the impact on one election. It is about a more extensive systematic hollowing out of our democracy if the more vulnerable sections of Indian society are excluded. It is high time opposition parties themselves created awareness about this urgent issue. If they fail to do so, the ground beneath their feet could be shifting, and all Indians and the democratic process itself would be on a slippery slope.

(Saba Naqvi is a journalist and an author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.

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