Maha No To SIR Now, Electoral Roll Revision Right After Municipal Polls!

Even when the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) was completed in Bihar, amid opposition protestations that died down soon enough, Maharashtra has held off its own electoral roll revision. Officialdom confirming this said, “We have informed the Election Commission of India (ECI) that we are unable to carry out the SIR in the state being seized of imminent polls to be held for 28 plus municipal corporations, councils and other local self-bodies in Maharashtra. We have already drawn requisite government personnel (mostly teachers drawn from educational institutions run by the state government) who cannot be redeployed for the purpose of conducting the SIR.” While Opposition political formations led by the Congress chief Rahul Gandhi launched protests over alleged impropriety in the electoral revision process, the large number of ineligible voters and subsequent expose over illegal Bangladeshi and Rohingyas being identified in Bihar saw the Opposition protests being muted soon enough. Maharashtra, for its part, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis told newspersons over a Diwali lunch that the state electoral rolls did in fact exhibit individual voters being registered at multiple locations, the incidence of the same voter exercising her/his franchise more than once was not evident. “Address changes and the proliferating migrant populations often caused the changed residential addresses, resultantly in multiple entries in electoral rolls and yet, no double voting incidence has been found to exist…Our priority is to hold the local self-bodies’ elections on pain of inviting public ire over the inordinately delayed civic elections across the state for over three years now.”