Indian electoral officials have granted voters in the state of Bihar only weeks to prove their citizenship, requiring documents that few have in a renewal of registration that will be applied throughout the country, which causes fears of deprivation of rights.
The Electoral Commission of India (ECI) announced the review of the voter lists in June before the next surveys in the eastern state.
He said the year will be replicated later throughout the country of 1,400 million people.
According to the ECI, the “intensive review” was necessary in part to avoid the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants.”
The members of the Hindu Nationalist Party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi Bharatiya Janata (BJP) have long said that a large number of undocumented Muslim migrants of neighboring Bangladesh have fraudulently entered the electoral lists of India.
Critics say that the review could make a large number of Indian citizens cannot vote.
“You are asked to produce documents that very few people,” said Asaduddin Owaisi, a prominent Muslim legislator.
“It will lead to the mass deprivation of rights.”
Opposition legislators say it will affect the most difficult minorities, including Muslims and Dalit communities, those in the lower step of the rigid hierarchy of castes of India.
‘Exhibitions designed’
All potential voters in Bihar must provide citizenship evidence before July 25.
Those registered in 2003, the last time the scrutiny of the voter list took place in Bihar, you can send a copy of that.
The rest, around 30 million people, according to ECI estimates, must provide evidence of their place and date of birth.
And those born after 1987 must also provide proof of the Indian citizenship of their parents.
The requirement affects more than a third of potential voters in Bihar, the third most populated state in India and its poorest.
It is also a crucial electoral battlefield as the only state in the Hindi -speaking belt in northern India, where Modi’s BJP has only ruled in a coalition.
The main opposition party of Bihar, the rashtriya Janata Dal, has challenged the Electoral Commission in the Supreme Court, along with other parts and activists.
“It is being used to justify aggressive and opaque reviews of the electoral rolls that are disproportionately to the Muslim, Dalit and poor (Indian) migrant communities,” said the judicial request.
“They are not random patterns but … engineering exclusions.” Unlike many other countries, India does not have a unique national identity card.
The “AADHAAR” identity card linked widely used is not among the documents listed by the ECI as acceptable evidence.
The documents that can be used include birth certificates, passports and registrations.
Of these, it is likely that most people trust their registration certificates.
But even those are scarce in Bihar, where literacy rates are among the lowest in India.
According to an analysis published in The Indian Express Newspaper, only 35 percent of people in the state have said document.
“In Bihar, where literacy is not very high, it is likely that many people have the type of documents that the ECI has demanded,” said Jagdeep Chhokar of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) based in New Delhi.
“The poor, poorly educated, without education and minorities will be the most affected.”
‘Foreign infiltrates’
The detractors say that the impulse is not preceded because “the documentary evidence has never demanded” the people who vote in India.
“Only those who especially wanted their inserted name necessary to fill a form,” said the political and academic activist Yogendra Yadav. “For the rest, someone would come home and register their names.”
“The responsibility in India was never in the voter but in ECI officials,” he added. In the previous verification units, modifications were made to the existing rolls, said Yadav.
Now, a list is being drawn from scratch.
Yadav said the impulse was a “de facto” implementation of an earlier plan to assemble a list of Indian citizens.
The National Registry of Citizens (NRC), which was compiled in the eastern state of Assam in 2019, left almost two million people out. Many of them were Muslims.
The BJP had said that the NRC would be replicated throughout the country, since it was necessary to detect “foreign infiltrates”, but was forced to go back after the furious protests.
“Everyone has to show that they are citizens of India,” Yadav said.
“That is exactly what the NRC is … this is NRC through the back door.”