India’s opposition parties have held a protest demanding the rollback of a revision of the voter list in the eastern state of Bihar, where elections are scheduled for its legislature in November.
Hundreds of lawmakers and supporters began Monday’s protest from parliament and were confronted by police who stopped them from marching towards the Election Commission office in the capital, New Delhi. Police briefly detained dozens of lawmakers, including the leader of the opposition Rahul Gandhi.
“This fight is not political but for saving the constitution,” Gandhi, who is an MP from the Indian National Congress party, told reporters after being detained.
“The truth is before the entire country,” he added.
More than 200 people took part in the protest, according to police officials quoted by the NDTV channel.
India’s opposition accuses the Election Commission of rushing through a mammoth electoral roll revision in the eastern state of Bihar, saying the exercise could render vast numbers of citizens unable to vote.
Gandhi last week said the revision of electoral rolls in Bihar is an “institutionalised chori [theft] to deny the poor their right to vote”.
The revision of nearly 80 million voter registrations
The revision affecting nearly 80 million voters involves strict documentation requirements from citizens, triggering concerns it could lead to the exclusion of vulnerable groups, especially those who are unable to produce the paperwork required to prove their citizenship.
Some of the documents required include birth certificates, passports and matriculation records.
Critics and opposition leaders said they are hard to come by in Bihar, where the literacy rate is among the lowest in India. They said the exercise will impact minorities the most, including Muslims, and bar them from voting.
India does not have a unique national identity card. The widely used biometric-linked identity card, called Aadhaar, is not among the documents listed by the Election Commission as acceptable proof for the electoral roll revision.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi‘s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) called the opposition leaders’ protest a “well-thought-out strategy” to create a “state of anarchy”, the NDTV reported.
‘Intensive revision’ needed, Election Commission says
The election body has denied the voter disenfranchisement allegations and has promised to ensure that no eligible voter is “left behind”. It has also said the “intensive revision” is a routine update needed to avoid the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants”.
According to the commission, 49.6 million voters whose names were included in a similar exercise in 2003 are not required to submit any further documents. But that still leaves almost 30 million other voters potentially vulnerable. A similar roll revision of voters is scheduled to be replicated across the entire country of 1.4 billion people.
Bihar is a crucial election battleground where the BJP has only ever governed in a coalition. Election results there could likely impact the balance of power in India’s Parliament.
The BJP has backed the revision and said it is necessary to update new voters and delete the names of those who have either died or moved to other states.
It also claimed the exercise is essential to weed out undocumented Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. But many Indian citizens, most of them Muslims, have been arrested and even deported to Bangladesh as part of a campaign launched by the BJP.
Critics and opposition leaders have also warned that the exercise is similar to that of a 2019 citizenship list in eastern India’s Assam state, which left nearly 2 million people at risk of statelessness.
Many of those left off the final citizenship list were Muslims who were declared “foreigners”. Some faced long periods of detention.
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