Need for Amendments to Electoral Laws
Need to bring amendments to our electoral and citizenship Acts to cleanse electoral rolls and frame a prospective method for determining citizenship The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls that was done in Bihar and is being done now across all States, is a ‘descent into farce’, as an editorial in The Hindu put it. The SIR is fast making a laughing stock of the ECI but the blow it is delivering to the very electoral system, the foundation of our democracy, is nothing short of tragic. The farcical SIR makes it imperative for the government to take a fresh look at its retrospective demands for documents to determine eligibility of voters, the flawed procedures for registering voters and for defining citizenship. What has been exposed is the gross lack of accuracy of India's electoral rolls and the discriminatory laws for conferring citizenship. The following suggestions for having accurate and clean electoral rolls and for having a prospective process for according ci...