Amid demands by some Opposition parties that the Election Commission of India (ECI) withdraw its direction to verify identity of burqa-clad women at Bihar’s polling stations, the poll body on Thursday claimed it is implementing a decision taken as back as 1994 when TN Seshan headed the poll authority.
An ECI spokesperson said that in October 1994, the poll body had ordered a dignified method of identifying burqa-clad women electors at polling stations. “...To protect the sensitivity regarding privacy of women voters, separate enclosures for identification of purdahnasheen women should be provided in the polling station with locally available but absolutely inexpensive devices and using local ingenuity, such as use of charpoys or cloth such as bedspreads,” the 1994 order read.
Meanwhile, the ECI termed the Bihar SIR “accurate” and told the Supreme Court that the petitioner political parties and NGOs are merely content with making “false allegations” to discredit the exercise. It also told the SC that not a single appeal has been filed against deletions since the publication of the electoral roll.
It denied the allegation of the petitioners that there was a “disproportionate exclusion of Muslims” from the final electoral roll of the State prepared after the months-long Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. “This communal approach is to be deprecated,” the poll panel said.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi, which noted the absence of political parties from the hearing due to rallies in the poll-bound State, said it expects the poll panel, as a responsible authority, to look into typographical errors and other mistakes in the final list of Bihar electoral roll prepared after the SIR exercise and come out with remedial measures.
