When K Nagarajan, a retired real estate manager based in Chennai, submitted the enumeration forms of verification of himself and five family members under the ongoing special intensive vetting (SIR) to the local booth level officers (BLOs), they warned him that his two daughters-in-law, M Tamilselvi and S Subhasini, could be deprived due to lack of documentation in the previous SIR from 2005. Tamilselvi’s parents died in Bengaluru five years ago.
“How can we possibly get something like that from parents who died in another state?” Nagarajan asked.
He said, “They have their Aadhaar cards, voter ID cards, bank accounts and yet the BLOs are saying that their forms will be rejected because we cannot fill the details since 2005. I am fed up. If we lose two votes in our family, we cannot do anything. But thousands of people like us will lose their votes because of such issues.”
Both women have been living in Chennai for more than a decade and have been active voters during that time, Natarajan said.
According to guidelines issued by the Election Commission of India, people who were below the voting age in 2005 are required to provide relevant details of family members, mostly parents, who were registered voters at that time.
Nagarajan’s complaints echo those expressed by others. Some have changed homes, migrated from other states, or have been unable to locate their details since 2005. Some have alleged lack of uniformity in instructions issued by BLOs.
S Sharmila, a software engineer based in Tharamani, Chennai’s IT corridor, said she was unable to retrieve her name from the ECI website because of the change of address – she moved to the same locality one street away after 2005. “I spent hours on the ECI website and I could not download my details. I was so stressed that I could have lost my vote,” said Sharmila. His family had received the enumeration forms from BLOs last week when they were distributing them door-to-door after the exercise began on November 4.
The website of the Election Commission of India (ECI) enables people to fill the online enumeration form and search for voter identification numbers and names from the 2005 list. For many people, this has proven to either be too time consuming or it doesn’t work at all.
The loss of democratic mandate, which threatens many people in Tamil Nadu, is at the heart of the pressure against this practice of governance led by the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).
Just months before the upcoming assembly elections, the party led by Chief Minister and party chief MK Stalin has taken to the streets to express its disapproval. Stalin described the exercise as an alleged attempt by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to aid the efforts of its ally in the state and the DMK’s primary rival, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), to eliminate voting rights, especially of minorities and women.
The DMK’s opposition has extended to the Supreme Court, where a petition against the exercise is being heard, filed just a day before the exercise was to begin on November 4.
In turn, the BJP and AIADMK have accused the DMK of being afraid of the exercise, which they say will clean up the voter lists and leave only genuine voters.
Meanwhile, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) started organizing “election helpdesks” in each of the 941 polling stations in the capital city from November 18. Residents across the city whom HT met at helpdesks said they were able to fill details in the enumeration forms only because of the help of BLOs and booth level agents (BLAs, appointed by political parties) at these desks.
Sumita and Amita, primary school teachers at Corporation School in South Chennai, are currently working as full-time BLOs since November 4. They also work as polling officers during elections, and are among the 68,467 BLOs in the state.
But, this means prolonged absence from class. “Our students have exams from December 15 and their parents keep asking us when we will come back,” Sumita said. Only 7 out of 23 faculty members in the corporation’s primary school were appointed as BLOs. “The rest of the teachers are sharing class work and taking turns teaching our classes,” his colleague said.
After the exercise begins on November 4, Sumita and Amita will go door-to-door with booth-level agents (BLAs) to distribute forms. Since November 18, both the corporations are working at the helpdesk in the school.
Description recovery problems are one of the most common problems. “For us too, it is confusing,” said Amita, showing a bundle of hundreds of papers – prints of the 2005 voter list for booth number 125, which is the booth in question. “”There are five Shekhars in this list and we don’t know how to match them to any one person. And how do we know who Shekhar’s father Kottayya is? It takes at least 20 minutes to make an application,” she said.
After collecting the completed enumeration forms, BLOs have to digitize them using their personal smart phones. Sumita said, “I am 53 years old and I am not able to read the small print of the 2005 list. We barely have any training so I take the help of my children to digitalize these forms and the work continues till midnight.”
BLOs on the outskirts of the city face similar struggles. In residential areas, some BLOs like S Lakshmi in Chengalpattu district have taken the help of resident welfare associations (RWAs). Meanwhile, intermittent heavy rains continue due to active North East Monsoon. “Because of the rain, I am not able to go door-to-door,” says Lakshmi. RAW gave them its library where they set up a helpdesk like in Chennai.
Even as BLOs complain of the extreme stress of the practice, and amid reports of several deaths, some by suicide, and hospitalizations of BLOs across the country, as well as reports of BLOs enduring insults and taking away people’s work in states like Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, some have alleged irregularities in the instructions of BLOs and lapses in their process.
“First they came and gave us only one counting form instead of two,” said ET Poovanthan, a voter from Tiruvallur district. After filling both the forms, voters have to hand over one form to the BLO and keep the other with them. “If we are not able to fill the 2005 details, they are asking us to submit as many documents as possible from the list of 13 such as our Aadhaar, Voter ID card. Some BLOs are asking for documents even after we fill them.”
Prashant, a veterinary supervisor working as a BLO in Chennai Corporation, has been receiving calls from confused voters not only from across the city but also from Trichy district. “BLOs should not give forms to voters who have shifted. But, people usually vote at the same booth even if they are shifted,” he said. HT observed that a caller from Trichy told him that he and his wife shifted from Chennai to his native Trichy in his old age after their children moved abroad. But his registered voting address remains under booth number 137 in Chennai.
Working as a helpdesk at a government-aided school in Adyar, a BLO is seated at a cramped desk with one BLA from the AIADMK and four BLAs from the DMK. The scene is interesting and according to some it reflects the bipolar rivalry of the two giants at the SIR helpdesk.
“DMK is the ruling party so they are overpowering us here. “We have to be very careful when they are handling the enumeration forms,” says AIADMK district secretary Ravi Selvaraj. Reiterating his party’s public position on the SIR, he addressed the problem faced by the elderly Trichy couple, “They have to change their address, get the enumeration forms in Trichy and vote there, not in Chennai,” he said.
Each of the 4 DMK BLAs currently has a smartphone sponsored by senior party members, where they independently upload details to the party’s internal database. DMK’s BLA B Murthy seems to be in the lead. He uses the example of a particular locality and displays in-depth knowledge of the party coalition in each house.
For BLOs, such knowledge makes it easier to identify voters and their households. “It is easier for us to identify voters in slums where everyone knows everyone else,” says Ravi.
According to the ECI, as of November 19, counting forms had been distributed to 95.16% of Tamil Nadu’s 64.1 million voters and 17.37% had been digitalised. “No one knows whether the forms will be accepted or rejected,” Prashant said. “There remains uncertainty ahead of the time the draft rolls will be published between December 9 and January 8, but some people are relieved to be able to submit completed forms now.
