atiya zaidi

The SIR is a Scam! Former CEC S.Y. Quraishi calls the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls “nothing less than a fiasco” and “a scam” driven by “complete bad intention.” Speaking in a wide-ranging interview recorded for the London Vārta with me in London, Mr Quraishi said the exercise finds no mention in the Constitution, the Representation of the People Act, or the Registration of Electors Rules, 1960. “For the last 75 years, the Election Commission has been updating the electoral rolls every year,” he noted. “All three of these laws apply in this case, and none of them contains any provision for an SIR.” He highlighted the one-sided nature of the process: “In today’s controversy we’ve seen deletions, deletions, deletions everywhere. There should also be additions somewhere. If people have migrated from here, they must have gone somewhere. But all these migrations were happening in thin air. Nearly 130 million migrated from where to where?” On the stated rationale, Quraishi pointed to the launch in Bihar: “When this exercise began, you may recall, in the press conference in Bihar the CEC said that there are lots of infiltrators here, and to catch the infiltrators we will do a Special Intensive Revision. They made 80 million people run around, because they introduced several new things. To this day it is not known how many infiltrators were caught. Please tell us that. That’s interesting. After the revision in Bihar, it never came out how many infiltrators there actually were—the ones for whom, in a way, the whole exercise was being done.” Full interview on the London Vārta podcast in the comments box. #cineinkpodcast #LondonVārta #syquraishi #IndiaElectionCommission #SIR