“Electoral genocide” is a word former MP Jawhar Sircar loves to use in the context of the Special Intensive Revision exercise undertaken by the Election Commission. “Guspathiya” (infiltrators) is another. Of course, none of these, he said, were coined by him. “Guspathiya is a term used by the Union Home Minister, Amit Shah. It is not my terminology,” he said, adding that the government continues to engage with them because they are Hindus. It is the Muslim infiltrators who are targeted and are in the eye of a storm, Sircar alleged in an interview to a national daily recently.
A former bureaucrat-turned-politician Sircar has served as chief electoral officer for two parliament elections. Stating that he is a “man of elections”, Sircar is familiar with the nitty gritty. “When the chief election commissioner started the roll revision in November, we knew that he would not be able to go through all these names. It is a nine-month process. You cannot reduce a semester from six month to two months and say it is a semester. The present chief election commissioner failed to understand or deliberately delayed it. The process should have started sometime in June or July. What stopped you?” said Sircar.
Thanks to the deletion of voters names, over 35 lakh, to quote Sircar, “electoral deletion on a mass scale has taken place”. He said: “You will find that most of these people are in the border districts where the margins are disturbing. Look at the angst: if a person has won in a particular constituency in West Bengal by 20,000 votes, this time if 40,000 people have been deprived of their right to vote, then those who had earlier won by a thin margin stand to lose. Therefore, those who are in the fray feel that they have been deprived of the chances of winning”.
Stating that the electoral map has been “radically changed” and deletions have cut down winning margins in more than half of Bengal, Sircar said: “This is a serious matter because the winning margins have been threatened. More than half of the landscape of Bengal has been cut to size. Call it electoral genocide or whatever else.”
Charging the present chief election commissioner of “junking everything that was done in the past,” Sircar said that the CEC has made his own set of rules. “How else do you explain 35 lakh people not being allowed to vote?”
Sircar is also among those who questions the Special Intensive Revision nomenclature, stating that in the law, nothing like this exists. “There are only two types of revision: Intensive or Partial. Intensive revision is allowed in law, but where is this word Special coming from? There is only one provision of Special Revision which becomes operative when a surgical intervention is required, say during a flood: an ad hoc arrangement. My sense is someone has combined the two and made it Special Intensive Revision which is not there in any law”.
On whether the courts overlooked this, Sircar said: “It appears that the court would look into this later on. For the present, they have looked more into the intention of the Election Commission.” He alleged that the Election Commission has “misled” the court by not giving the “full picture”, adding that the court is quite clear that “some amount of mischief is going on”.
On the controversial issue of “logical discrepancy”, Sircar said: “You have to see this in the cultural context. In Bengal, like in many other places of India, certain names can be spelt differently. Banerjee can be spelt in three ways; Chakrabarty can be spelt in 27 ways. People who use Banerjee, Mukherjee or Chatterjee, in Bangla it is Bandyopadhyay, Chattopadhyaya or Mukhopadhyay. So, Mamata Banerjee in Bengal is Mamata Bandyopadhyay. Now in the electoral rolls if the son’s name is Banerjee and father name Bandopadhyaya, it is a logical discrepancy. A great example is Rabindranath Tagore—Tagore in English and Thakur in Bangla. If you feed this into the computer, it would show up as logical discrepancy and this being fed into the computer without adequate cultural input being fed in has affected a lot of people because of the lack and inadequacy of the understanding of the ground realities by the Election Commission: partly impractical, partly ingenious and partly exclusive.”
When asked if there is a method in this madness, Sircar answered in the affirmative: “Not only I but crores of voters who are saying that this must have been done as part of a scheme and a plan and if people happen to drop on the way, let them”.
Sircar uses an interesting term for this: “The tughlaki way”. When asked to elaborate, he said: “Another person did this and that was Mohammad Bin Tughlaq. When he wanted to shift the capital, people died on the way, he said theekh hai, it is ok. This is the tughlaki way, if I may put it: dry the ocean to count the fish; never mind how many fish died on the bank. If they do, so be it”.
Sircar is also quite clear that the SIR is being used as a political tool to target West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. “There is no doubt about it. We have 27 percent Muslim voters who will never vote for the BJP. So, something must be done and that is to slash this 27 percent Muslim voters by half. So, how else can you do it without this SIR; without this logical discrepancy…it is a well-planned thing,” he said.
Add to this the harassment the people have been subjected to and the picture is complete. “Many of these people were anti-TMC voters. Going by what they have been subjected to, these people may turn to TMC and vote against the BJP in rage, disgust and anger. It has also wiped off the anti-incumbency factor. SIR gave Mamata a sub-national appeal. What played out is that they are after our people, after my state, after the Bengali people,” he said, adding that in the process “Mamata has emerged a saviour”. On this count, Banerjee has scored and “stolen the limelight”, adding that she has articulated the sentiment for her political ends.
The veiled criticism fits in given that the erstwhile loyalist that Sircar was, has now turned a critic. For record, Sircar resigned as an MP mid-way into his term after he was disillusioned with the TMC: the party that sent him to the Rajya Sabha.
As things stand, the current state election in West Bengal is no longer a fight between BJP and state government, the local or governance issues. It is the need to stay together as Bengalis to safeguard their cultural identity.
—The writer is an author, journalist and political commentator