Assam: Poll panel begins voter roll overhaul amid NRC shadow

Amidst concerns of the stalemate over the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has started preparation to carry out the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) in Assam. It has appointed booth-level officers (BLO), and training has started in different areas.

Sources in the election offices told ET, “Last month, BLOs were appointed mainly from the teaching community. As it was summer vacation, training sessions were rolled out for BLOs on the electoral rolls’ revision.”

A BLO who did not want to be identified told ET, “Fresh BLOs were appointed. In the training session, there were talks of SIR and BLO forms. In case of new voters, we are made aware about the documents we should seek like birth certificate, photograph, parent’s voters identity card and address proof. For deletion, we were suggested to look for death certificates.”

Assam is going for assembly polls early next year. Assam has a fragile demographic profile and as per the Assam Accord, signed after a six-year anti-foreigners’ movement, led by AASU, the cut-off date for detecting foreigners in Assam is March 24, 1971.

Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had recently said that voter list revision cannot stop the demographic invasion which several areas of Assam were facing.

Sarma had said, “Voter revision cannot stop demographic invasion as in Assam the citizenship starts with 1971 not 1951 like in the rest of the country. So, technically you may not say that everybody is not an Indian.”

Talking about the SIR process in Bihar, Sarma had said, “Here, we have done the NRC. What will come out of it, I do not know. In South Salmara, Mankachar, Hailakandi there is no mechanism. Assam’s problem cannot be solved by bringing something that is happening in some other state.”

Assam was the first state in the country where the NRC exercise was rolled out, NRC is a Supreme Court-monitored exercise aimed at weeding out illegal immigrants. The supplementary NRC list, published on August 31, 2019, had found more than 31.1 million people eligible to be included in the registry while leaving out over 1.9 million people.

BJP has been unhappy over the NRC and has stated as NRC authority refused to accept refugee certificates issued prior 1971 because of which large-scale Bengalee Hindus, Koch Rajbonshis and Buddhist people got excluded from NRC.