The verdict, in extension, clouds Rahul Gandhi-led Congress leadership’s ‘vote chori’ charge, thus making it a twin-challenge for the Opposition to deal with. The judgement also means that one of the last surviving threads, SIR, that had somewhat strung together the crisis-torn INDIA bloc parties, now stands on the verge of snapping all the more after their electoral routs in Bihar and West Bengal polls.
While Opposition camps tried to cite “ironies” and “contradictions” in SC order, yet the mood in these camps was downcast, with some conceding in private it would be difficult to credibly sustain SIR and ‘vote chori’ as political planks.
Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi, who was among Opposition’s lawyers in the SIR case, said while SC acknowledged the constitutional validity of SIR in its judgement, this also raised many questions.
“It has been clarified that ECI is not the final authority on matters of citizenship and that it can only deal with this issue administratively while referring the matter to a competent authority like the Ministry of Home Affairs. If this is true, then how were 7.5 crore people in several states of the country removed from the electoral system before a decision on their citizenship was even made,” Singhvi asked. He lamented the constricted timelines of SIR exercises in Bihar and West Bengal and wondered why the SC order didn’t strongly comment on the ‘irony’ of SIR first removing many from the voters’ list and then allowing adjudication when elections were over.
But, on the political ground, many in the Opposition had conceded that they were lacking in the organisational wherewithal and leadership imagination to rally the masses against SIR in Bihar, resulting in negligible formal complaints from many of these parties’ booth representatives in pinpointing questionable deletions. While the Opposition politically tried to project SIR in Bihar and West Bengal as an attempt to exclude members of the minority communities, BJP countered it by marketing the ECI drive as a mission to cleanse the electoral rolls of ‘infiltrators’.
The below par public response that the Congress’ campaigns against ‘vote chori’ had evoked has more or less grounded that plank, but some party leaders internally lament that the very issue was deftly used by the leadership to avert any serious in-house assessment on the reasons for the party’s poor show in Bihar and Haryana. After the SC verdict, Opposition leaders face the test and task of erecting new, politically saleable planks in the next elections.
