Many Indians ‘not Citizens’ for Karnataka poll officials

BENGALURU: Election authorities in Karnataka may have rejected voter IDs to thousands of people in the state after listing them as ‘not Indian citizens’.
It was only after an analyst pointed out the improbability of so many foreigners applying for voter IDs that the state election authority reopened the rejected applications and realised the goof-up. They are now trying to correct the mistake.

Bengaluru-based electoral analyst PG Bhat’s analysis of the electoral data of Bengaluru City revealed of a total 2.14 lakh applications for voter IDs received during the summary revision of electoral rolls in October 2017, election authorities had rejected 22,737 applications. As many as 3,240 of these were rejected because they were ‘not Indian citizens’. These figures are only for Bengaluru City. The number of applications rejected throughout the state on the same grounds are not available.

Bhat’s research itself was prompted by a Washington DC researcher’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly, after the Karnataka Assembly elections in May. The article suggested that an unusually large number of Muslim adults were missing from the voters list in Karnataka as of March. Bhat’s analysis of the next revision of electoral rolls — in February — revealed that of the 48,692 rejected applications, 6,204 were listed as ‘not Indian citizens’.

Said Bhat: “There was no clear pattern to establish election authorities were rejecting applications of only Muslims. But then the data clearly showed that something was amiss. How can Bengaluru have so many non-resident Indians applying for inclusion in electoral rolls?”

Sensing it was due to unprofessional behaviour of the authorities, he dug further. Apparently, something similar had happened earlier, too. A year ago, election authorities had illegally disqualified applicants in bulk (a person can be disqualified only if he/she is mentally unfit or is convicted for a crime). “It is a very serious issue because declaring a person as non-Indian citizen can lead to several other problems. Also, it is purely illegal on the part of the election authorities to term a citizen of India as a non-citizen,” Bhat said.

The authorities who took cognisance of the matter are now verifying the rejected applications, first in Padmanabha Nagar. Their inquiry apparently revealed that the issue was the result of a goof-up during data entry. The explanation offered was that the officers concerned had chosen ‘not Indian citizen’ over choosing the ‘non-resident’ option.

“On verifying 85 rejected forms in Padmanabha Nagar, we found that they are all Indian citizens. There was an issue with the drop-down menu that booth-level officers and electoral-registration officers use, resulting in wrong attribution. We will carry out verification across the state and fix the issue,” chief electoral officer Sanjiv Kumar told ET.