ECs should have annulled SIR decisions they opposed, not just dissent: former CEC O.P. Rawat

Former Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat has said that the two Election Commissioners who objected to decisions taken on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls should have gone beyond recording dissent notes and should have moved to annul those decisions at the very next meeting of the three-member Commission.

The SIR is a door-to-door verification exercise in which electoral rolls are revised and the names of electors who cannot be traced are removed, subject to appeals before designated tribunals. The Election Commission has said such exercises are aimed at removing entries of dead, shifted, duplicate and permanently absent voters.

In an interview, Mr. Rawat said Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected to several aspects of the SIR, 14 times over a ten-month period. Their objections, he said, covered changes to Form 6 — normally used for fresh voter registration — and an added declaration on the ECINet portal asking new voters whether they, their parents or grandparents had appeared in the electoral roll of the previous SIR. The third member of the Commission is Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

“They had the majority [in the ECI]. In the very next meeting, when their first objections were not heard, they should have annulled all the decisions taken against which they had an opinion,” Mr. Rawat said. “They should have taken the right decision, which would have prevailed. So obviously, they did not take that route.”

Mr. Rawat served as Chief Election Commissioner from January 23, 2018 to December 1, 2018, and had been an Election Commissioner from 2015.

The CEC has no veto

Describing how the Commission functions, the former CEC said meetings were usually held regularly, with a fixed day each week and additional meetings as required. “All kinds of permutations and combinations were used to ensure that decisions were quick, efficient, and nothing suffered because of pending decisions,” he said.

Asked how Commissioners arrive at a consensus, Mr. Rawat said that when members are not on the same page, meetings help them understand each other’s point of view and reach an agreement. In the “one in a million” instances where consensus cannot be reached, he said, there is the recourse of voting, in which the majority opinion prevails.

“The Chief Election Commissioner himself does not have any veto. Absolutely not. He is equivalent to the other Commissioners,” he said.

‘Damage already done’

On the SIR process in West Bengal, Mr. Rawat said the damage had been done before the Assembly election. “93% of the deleted voters whose appeals have been decided by the tribunals were found eligible, and they missed exercising their voting right in the elections. That is something very serious for a democracy,” he said.

He noted that the Supreme Court had upheld the Election Commission’s right to conduct a special revision of rolls in its judgement on the Bihar SIR. “The initial paras will give the impression that the Election Commission is all powerful. But then in the last para, they say that the Election Commission will refer all those cases where they found questionable citizenship to a competent authority. And once the competent authority decides, then their names can be included again,” he said. “But what happens to their vote? No mention of that.”

Asked about changes to Form 6, which is now also being used to add back names wrongly excluded during the SIR, Mr. Rawat said the Commission was acting on the basis of the Supreme Court judgement of May 27. “And since it is the Supreme Court’s verdict, we all have to obey and follow. Actually, I can’t say anything over and above the Honourable Supreme Court’s order. I have to obey, respect the Supreme Court’s order,” he said.

Mr. Rawat’s remarks add to the continuing public debate over the conduct of the revision exercise, the process by which excluded electors can be restored to the rolls, and the time such restoration takes. As a matter of record, the Commission has maintained that the exercise follows the law and that affected persons may seek restoration through the prescribed appeals process.