Now, it is disenfranchisement with a Diwali discount. On the eve of the festival, the Election Commission of India (ECI) issued a directive offering concessions to voters excluded by SIR in the seven states where the exercise has still not officially concluded. The concessions are not trivial. The ECI has conceded many of the procedural demands of the anti-SIR activists. The trouble with this festival offer is that the discount voucher has expired for all but a handful of the disenfranchised voters. For the rest, the ECI’s communication is an admission of guilt and a cruel reminder of the unfair bulldozing of the voters’ list in the name of SIR.Following The Indian Express’s expose and the renewed anti-SIR stir, the ECI had already backtracked from many procedural irregularities. A report in this newspaper (‘Election Commission completes Form 6 U-turn,’ IE, November 4), lists these U-turns. But most of these are internal to the functioning of the ECI.AdvertisementThe latest volte-face is different. The ECI’s letter of November 6 to the Chief Electoral Officer of seven states — Delhi, Maharashtra, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana and Nagaland — is the most significant public-facing reversal on SIR by the ECI. It offers multiple reliefs to the 4.52 crore voters whose names were excluded from the draft SIR electoral rolls in these states. The all-India figure of such exclusions on grounds of “Absent, Shifted, Dead, Duplicate” (ASDD) is 13.3 crore. Now, in these seven states, the deadline for submission of enumeration forms has been waived. Voters who could not submit their forms by the deadline can still do so, with an explanation for the delay. Those who have shifted residence do not need to go through the torture of Form 6 and pretend to be a new voter. They can simply fill the enumeration form with a statement of their new address and come back to the rolls. Homeless persons, including those slum dwellers whose colonies were demolished, would now be saved from documentary harassment. A simple field verification by the BLO will suffice to include their names. The ECI would give wide publicity to these measures to ensure that no deserving voter is left out.Two retractions of far-reaching implications are buried in the fine print of this communication. So far, the ECI has insisted that any wrongfully excluded voter has only one route to come back to the voters’ list: Falsely declare to be a “new voter”, fill Form-6 and come back to the rolls with a fresh EPIC number that leaves no trace of the past of that voter. Now the ECI has discovered a new provision in the law, Rule 21(1) of the Registration of Electors Rules 1960, that allows the ERO to take remedial action to correct names omitted due to “inadvertence or error”. In another welcome turnaround, the ECI now directs that those excluded voters whose names are restored will be reassigned their old EPIC number. So far the ECI had stoutly resisted such suggestions. The two reversals confirm that the ECI has been bluffing for the last 16 months.The ECI’s climbdown did not happen on its own. An unwilling ECI had to be pushed by some scathing observations of the Supreme Court. This was during a hearing on a petition filed by two of the co-authors (Bhardwaj and Johri), questioning the SIR process in Delhi. While hearing this case on October 28, the Court underlined that forcing persons on the ASDD list to fill Form 6 was an “error” and a “structural incongruity”. The bench headed by the CJI said that such voters should be allowed to fill Enumeration Form or Form 8 if they are marked as permanently shifted or as absent/ untraceable. The Court also observed that the legality of “Logical Discrepancy” was an open question.AdvertisementYet the ECI dragged its feet. Instead of acting on the SC’s oral directives, the ECI issued a clarification on November 3, doubling down on Form 6’s use. In the weird clarification, the ECI assured the voters that notwithstanding the explicit wording of Form 6 of being a first-time voter, it would not be a false declaration and any apprehension regarding prosecution for false declaration is misplaced. In other words, the ECI said: We know you are making a false declaration, but don’t worry, we won’t prosecute you.We don’t know what prompted a rethink within two days. All we know is that there is a complete change of orientation. This is a stunning moral victory for the anti-SIR campaign. The ECI now speaks a language that it used to speak for 75 years, a language of inclusion, of ensuring that no eligible voter is left out.you may likeYet it does not redeem SIR, even if belatedly. If the ECI believes that the revised procedures are fair, it does not tell us why these were not made available to the three-fourths of the Indian states where SIR is done and dusted. Why should the voters in Bengaluru, who witnessed greater exclusion than Delhi, not have the benefit of these reliefs? What about states like Bihar and West Bengal that have had elections based on egregious deletions during SIR? Even in these seven states, where the SIR was practically over, what happens to all those voters who already submitted Form 6? Would they get their old EPIC back? The big question is: Will the ECI go out of its way to undo the massive exclusion in these and other states? Or, would it allow these new directions to remain on paper and file a report that only a handful of voters came back on the rolls?Despite these sweeping reversals, the SIR continues to retain its structural features that run against the democratic principle of universal adult franchise. Even in this revised form, the SIR continues to shift the onus of being on the voters’ list on to the voter. Its overturning of the presumption of citizenship continues. It continues to operationalise lineage-based voting rights. Even if these reliefs were available to everyone, the SIR retains its disenfranchising impulse. If anything, this belated backtracking underscores the value of democratic street protests. This admission of guilt by the ECI serves to strengthen peoples’ resolve: With dicount or without discount, SIR is an unfair deal. It must be rolled back.Bhardwaj and Johri are RTI activists and members, Satark Nagrik Sangathan and NCPRI. They are also litigants on the SIR process in Delhi. Yadav is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor, Bharat Jodo Abhiyan.Views are personal