New Delhi: Former election commissioner (EC) Ashok Lavasa, on Tuesday (October 13), said voters in West Bengal had been removed from electoral rolls on the suspicion that they were not Indian citizens, rather than on the basis of evidence.Speaking at a citizens’ convention in Kolkata demanding the scrapping of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Lavasa alleged that electoral registration officers (EROs), the only officials authorised to delete names, had been denied access to the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) centrally-controlled ECINET software.“EROs are only authorised officials to remove voters. But they were unable to access ECINET. This amounts to illegality. In normal course, appeals against decision by EROs can go to the district election officers or chief electoral officer,” he said, describing the exclusion of EROs as illegal.The former EC also accused the ECI of working to keep people off the voter rolls instead of putting them on. “With the tactics deployed this time, the goal is not to include. Possibly the priority is to exclude people from the voter list on the suspicion that they are not Indian citizens and not on evidence,” he said, addressing the gathering via video link.Ex-EC Ashoka Lavasa speaking at the convention, Photo: By arrangement.The citizens’ convention was organised by former MP and retired IAS officer Jawhar Sircar and Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya. It made three demands, namely cancellation of the SIR exercise, removal of the CEC and an independent probe into what the organisers called “a criminal conspiracy” behind the mass disenfranchisement of voters. Other speakers at the convention included writer Shamik Bandyopadhyay, former vice-chancellor of Jadavpur University Ashok Nath Basu, former IAS officer Anita Agnihotri, activist and filmmaker Prakash Raj and Aparna Bhattacharya, a journalist and data analyst who has covered the SIR extensively for The Wire.The event was held in the open, in front of the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee Centre for Culture and Research on A.J.C. Bose Road, after two of the city’s main cultural venues, Kala Mandir and the Academy of Fine Arts, cancelled the organisers’ bookings. Sircar said the venues refused because the gathering was seen as “anti-government”.The shift to the street drew a large crowd, including several voters whose names had been deleted during the revision. Dissent from within the commissionLavasa, in his speech, pointed to recent reports revealing that ECs Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had put objections on record at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions taken without their knowledge, during the same period when the SIR was rolled out across the country. He said the lack of public minutes and agendas made it impossible to know whether SIR-related decisions were unanimous, decided by majority or taken by the CEC alone. “This casts a doubt in the minds of the people whether the decisions of the Election Commission, including on the SIR, were unanimous or taken by majority,” he said.He also questioned the commission’s use of birth-date categories drawn from the Citizenship Act to sort voters, arguing that Article 326 of the constitution requires the ECI to enrol every adult citizen who is not specifically disqualified. “If people feel that the umpire is not neutral, they will question the winning team’s victory as well,” Lavasa said.Disqualification on the basis of discrepancyLavasa also called out the removal of voters over discrepancies in administrative records, saying that logical errors were not grounds enough for disenfranchising a voter.“Discrepancy cannot be ground for disqualification…All those born in India and who have attained 18 years should be on the voters’ list. The people who were struck off the roll were once included by ECI in the voters’ list using its procedures, ” he said.The former EC also questioned the timing of the SIR in West Bengal, arguing that the ECI went ahead with the lengthy exercise even though it knew that the time frame before the approaching state assembly elections was very short.“Revision of rolls happened earlier also. But never in history voters were so anxious and so worried whether their names will remain or will be excluded from the list,” he added.Sircar questions form 7 applicationsSircar, a former chief electoral officer of West Bengal, called the SIR guidelines a “corporate document” and said that senior ECI officials should face criminal charges over the alleged “conspiracy” behind the mass deletions. “They need to be tried on criminal conspiracy charges, even if they do resign after the current movement,” he said.He demanded that the commission disclose who filed the large number of form 7 applications, used to object to a voter’s voter’s inclusion or seek the removal of a name from the electoral roll. He also criticised the slow pace at which roughly 30 lakh wrongly-excluded voters were restored to the roll. Figures cited at the convention showed that, in West Bengal, 6,39,049 form 7 applications had been processed, of which 5,72,330 had resulted in deletions, a success rate of about 90%. Of the 34,13,481 form 6 applications seeking the addition of names, only 7,07,606 – or 21% – had been accepted. More than 7.26 lakh addition requests had been rejected and about 4.86 lakh had not been processed at all.Investigative reports from Uttar Pradesh, cited by critics, state that the ECI’s ERONET software generated 87,127 form 7 applications on its own, 85,858 of which reportedly gave no reason for deletion. Similarly, in West Bengal, 5,38,320 form 7 applications were allegedly generated by the EROs without a reason for deletions.Moreover, as per a report submitted by the ECI to the Supreme Court, around 38.3 lakh appeals to SIR deletions have been filed before tribunals. Of these, 22.2 lakh appeals concerned voters who had been excluded, while 16.1 lakh appeals challenged the inclusion of names.‘A human tragedy’Agnihotri, who has overseen roll revisions herself, called the process “a human tragedy”.“We were always told that voting is an important right of the people, and we took extra effort to include even the last person in the rolls so they could exercise their rights,” she said, “Now it’s reversed. All efforts are being made to see how people can be excluded.”Agnihotri questioned how any government could claim a real mandate in seats where the number of excluded voters was larger than the winning margin.Former Rajya Sabha MP Bhattacharya said the deletions fell hardest on religious minorities, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and other groups that often lack the long paper trail the SIR demands. He added that the commission had a duty to make sure no eligible voter was removed in the name of ‘cleaning the rolls’.Photo: By arrangement.Raj called the SIR the “most dangerous disease” facing Indian democracy and said it aimed to “divide the country into two – people who can vote and people who cannot vote.”Raj contextualised the revision within a broader, multi-year strategy by the ruling political establishment to dismantle opposition forces nationwide. “Even before Gyanesh Kumar came (as the CEC), they (BJP) broke parties in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Bihar,” he said.He also claimed that the Union government’s efforts to defend the chief election commissioner, who is currently under fire for major irregularities in the SIR process, were evidence of such a relationship.“This regime of Modi and Shah used ECI. You have seen how they broke parties in Maharashtra and Bihar before SIR and Gyanesh Kumar came into picture. They have centralised data; they have used Form 7 to delete minority votes. The way Modi govt wants to save CEC shows how ECI helped them. As civil society, it is time that we come together,” said Raj.Concerns over the scale of the revisionIn West Bengal, around 60 lakh voters were placed under adjudication during the SIR process. Murshidabad, Malda and Uttar Dinajpur together accounted for more than 24 lakh of them. The Wire has previously reported on individual polling booths in Lalgola, Murshidabad, were the flagged voters were overwhelmingly Muslim, while a fully Hindu booth nearby had zero people flagged.Aparna shared the case of Sahinura Begum, 26, of Raiganj in Uttar Dinajpur. Marked “under adjudication” on the February 28 final roll, she was finally cleared on March 27. Six days later, an unknown person filed an appeal to have her name struck off again. A tribunal dismissed the appeal on April 18.“Sahinura won. But think about it. A citizen had to prove twice that she is a voter in her own country, and the second test was completely manufactured,” she said.Photo: By arrangement.Citing the ECI’s own submission to the Supreme Court on September 16, she said 16 lakh of the 38 lakh appeals before the tribunals sought to delete other people’s names, many of them voters already cleared by judicial officers. “The tribunal that was set up to correct mistakes has today become a new route for cutting names,” Aparna added.ECI’s defence of SIRThe commission has defended the revision as necessary to clear the rolls of dead, shifted and duplicate voters. It claims that filing a form 7 application does not automatically lead to deletion without a hearing and that party booth-level agents provide local oversight. On October 9, the ECI capped the number of form 7 applications one person can file at 10, citing “unsubstantiated bulk objections”, and recommended prosecution for false declarations. Organisers of the citizens’ convention notes that the step came too late.In May, the Supreme Court upheld the SIR’s validity under Article 324 but ruled that the ECI cannot make a final decision on anyone’s citizenship. It had also ordered for Aadhaar card to be accepted as a 12th identity document, directing the commission to publish lists of deleted voters.Meanwhile, Union ministers have dismissed opposition protests over irregularities in the SIR exercise as “street drama”. The convention was held three days after more than 240 opposition MPs, led by Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge, met President Droupadi Murmu with a memorandum seeking to halt the SIR.For our full coverage on the SIR and the issues it has brought to citizens, click here.