AS THE confusion over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) being conducted by the Election Commission in Bihar continues, the BJP too is feeling the heat. Acting reportedly on adverse reports from the ground, Bihar BJP organisation secretary Bhikhu Bhai Dalsania on Monday held a meeting with 26 state functionaries, instructing them to fan out across the state, meet voters, remove their apprehensions, and help the party’s supporters with the enrolment process.
Sources said the worry in the party is that it has let Opposition — which has been warning of “mass disenfranchisement” and questioning “the EC’s haste” – drive the narrative on the issue. The Opposition has also been ahead of the BJP in ramping up the number of its Booth Level Agents (BLAs) to reach voters.
Over the weekend, BJP national general secretary B L Santhosh was in Bihar, and held top-level meetings in Rajgir and Muzaffarpur. Sources said that apart from discussion on election preparations, Santhosh wanted to know “how people were reacting to the SIR”.
At Monday’s meeting, sources said, Dalsania told BJP leaders to ensure that the party’s BLAs visit as many polling booths as possible. From July 19 onwards, BJP leaders will also be holding Assembly constituency-wise meetings to get their own feedback on the SIR. These will go on till July 31, or one day before the publication of the first draft electoral roll.
A senior BJP leader, who was present at the meeting held by Dalsania, told The Indian Express: “We discussed people’s concerns, mainly over the tearing hurry with which the EC has been going about the SIR. Even the receipt (a second enumeration form) is not being given to any voter who is applying, while most of the people claim no one has collected forms from them yet.”
Despite the Opposition push to register more workers as BLAs, the BJP still has the highest, at over 52,000. The BJP leader said that notwithstanding this number advantage, the party’s BLAs were yet to cover all the 73,000 polling booths. “We look complacent as compared to the Opposition.”
The leader added that the EC’s decision to hold the massive exercise months before the Assembly polls had caught the state BJP as much by surprise, with its BLAs unprepared for what was to follow. “It is only when we noticed Opposition parties being pro-active at the booth level that we realised that we needed to catch up and be equal to the task.”
The BJP leader added that the period after August 1 – when the supplementary documents to be provided for enrolment as voters are to be uploaded – would be even more crucial. Their feedback showed that hardly 30% who have submitted enrolment forms so far have done so with the required documentary proof, the leader said. “Though the EC has not provided a break-up of the collected and uploaded forms, we have gathered from field reports that 70%-80% people have submitted the forms without any of the 11 documents specified by the EC.”
Election Registration Officers will be taking the final call on electoral rolls on the basis of the documents submitted. “We want our BLAs to be involved in the SIR process till the very end,” the leader said. “There are two types of BLAs: BLA-1, who are one per Assembly segment, covering all the 243 seats; and BLA-2, who are delegated per polling booth and who interact with Booth Level Officers of the EC. BJP functionaries will now tag along with both sets of BLAs.”
A BJP spokesperson said: “We appreciate the SIR process, but we have our concerns. We are cooperating to ensure that all valid voters stay in the list, but there are chances some who have migrated for work will get left out. We hope the EC’s online app addresses this.”
Between June 25, when the SIR began, till July 2, the EC data shows, total BLAs across parties in the state had risen by 13%. The opposition INDIA bloc, comprising the RJD, Congress and Left, had added 17.51% more BLAs, boosting their total from 56,038 to 65,853. Among them, the Congress nearly doubled its BLA presence, from 8,586 to 16,500 – a 92.17% jump.
The NDA, led by the BJP and JD(U), saw a comparatively lesser surge of 10.86%, with their BLA count rising from 80,083 to 88,781. The BJP added barely 1.39% more BLAs in the period, going up from 51,964 to 52,689, while the JD(U) boosted its BLA numbers by 24.13%, taking its total from 27,931 to 34,669.