Union Minister of Law and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad does not favour linking Aadhaar with voter ID card. He said so in Bengaluru on April 1. He, though, added that it was his personal view.
Personal or official, this view makes little sense to the people at a time when the government is going all out to link Aadhaar with everything conceivable by projecting it as the panacea for all evils afflicting the society. In fact, the voter ID should have been the first to be linked with Aadhaar in order to eliminate the scourge of fake voters which have been vitiating electoral process.
The problem of fake voters has been there from the beginning but not on the large scale witnessed in the recent years. The BJP appears to be the biggest beneficiary of the fake voters. Could the fear of checking fake voters through Aadhaar linkage have made Prasad say that linking Aadhaar with voter ID is not necessary?
Narendra Modi had won from Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency with a margin of over 3.7 lakh votes in 2014. During the revision of electoral rolls towards the end of the year, over six lakh fake voters were discovered in the Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency. It did not help Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal who was a runner-up in Varanasi Lok Sabha constituency. But it made him wiser for the forthcoming Delhi Assembly elections.
Both AAP and Congress had detected bogus entries in voters’ lists for the Delhi Assembly elections. Leaders of the two parties approached the Election Commission but the Election Commission behaved shabbily and refused to take notice of their complaints. The matter was then taken to Delhi High Court which pulled up the Election Commission and asked it what action it had taken on the allegation about the presence of a large number of bogus voters in various Assembly constituencies of the national capital. ‘What is the cause of it? Obviously someone is not doing their job properly’, Justice Vibhu Bakhru said while directing the Chief Election Commissioner and the Chief Electoral Officer of Delhi to file an affidavit ‘indicating the cause of error.’ The court said that there were ‘discrepancies’ in the electoral rolls as shown by the petitioner, Naresh Kumar. The court also said that the allegation that there were many persons in the city who had numerous voter cards in their names but with different addresses needed to be rectified if they were still existing.
In response to the complaints of Aam Aadmi Party and Congress that Delhi’s electoral rolls carried names of a large number of bogus voters, Election Commission wrote to the two parties on January 11, 2015 that 1,20,605 ‘duplications’ had been noticed in the electoral rolls (which have been deleted). Election Commission’s response came two days before it was scheduled to file an affidavit in the High Court. That AAP got 67 seats and BJP only three in the 70-seat Delhi assembly is history.
Madhya Pradesh had two Assembly by-elections in February this year. During the campaign, Congress activists detected discrepancies in voters’ lists. Photocopies showing the same voter registered in more than one locality started appearing in social media. As the complaints at local level did not have the desired effect, the party led by Lok Sabha member from Shivpuri Jyotiraditya Scindia approached the Election Commission. A summary re-check of voters’ lists was ordered. A week before the day of polling, the Ashoknagar district Collector’s office sent its report to the Chief Electoral Officer in Bhopal saying that 1800 fake voters had been detected in Mungaoli Assembly constituency (which falls in Ashoknagar district). Of these 1800, as many as 834 were dead, 312 were listed at more than one place, 245 voters were not traceable and 435 had been transferred to different places but had not got their names in Mungaoli constituency deleted. Similar was the case for Kolaras Assembly constituency (in Shivpuri district).
The BJP candidates were defeated in both the constituencies though Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had made it appear like a life and death question for himself by deputing all the party leaders including his cabinet colleagues to campaign there. The BJP campaign did not recognise the words like ethics and morality.
The Election Commission has ordered a full revision of voters’ lists in Madhya Pradesh in view of the Assembly elections due later this year. So far the Collectors have detected nearly seven lakh fake voters – three lakh of them dead and four lakh untraceable. Scrutiny is on.
