Bihar to be the first state to allow NRI Voting
April 15, 2015
Till the provision was amended in 2010, Section 20 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 disqualified a non-resident Indian (NRI) from getting his/her name registered in the electoral rolls.
The earlier provision of 1950 entitled every Indian citizen who attained the legal age of voting and “is ordinarily resident in a constituency” to be registered in the electoral rolls in that constituency. However, till 2010, when the first amendments were made to the existing law, the term “ordinarily resident” had excluded citizens who had migrated to some foreign country, a person of India origin as well as someone who was born outside India.
In 2010, the Representation of the People (Amendment) Bill was passed to allow the non-resident Indians to vote in the elections. However the process was cumbersome as the overseas Indians were required to first fill out a form, get it certified by an Indian Foreign Service officer in the country where they lived, send it and other documents to the voter registration offices closest to their official residences in India, and thereafter, travel all the way to India to be present personally at the polling booth to vote!
The complications involved in such a procedure meant that only that one NRI – a man living in Oman — voted in the state elections in 2011. Besides, out of roughly one crore Indians living overseas of which about 60 lakh are of eligible voting age, only a few thousand got themselves registered and out of them barely anyone travelled to India to cast the vote.
It is in this light that the renewed move to bring the NRIs within the ambit of voting needs to be seen. To facilitate voting for NRIs, the Election Commission of India is now jointly working with the Union Law Ministry and studying the provisions of voting through proxy (read a nominee residing in India) and e-postal ballots for the NRIs. Under the e-postal ballot route, an NRI would be able to vote by downloading the ballot paper which would be accessible to the NRI voter once (s)he got himself/herself registered online through a secure password. The ballot paper needs to be self-attested and sent back to the returning officer by snail mail within the prescribed period.
Already the provision of voting through proxy exists for the members of the armed forces. But to extend it to others entails not just cost but also upgrading the existing technology.
To extend the provisions to the NRIs, necessary amendments would be required in the Representation of People Act, which the government hopes to make by the monsoon session of Parliament.
If things work out well, then the upcoming state elections in Bihar could well be the first state to avail of these provisions for NRI voting. In the state the Election Commission will have to constitute a new assembly by November 29. However, it is not yet clear whether whole of Bihar will be covered under the new provisions or it will be limited only to a few constituencies. But if the experiment proves to be successful in Bihar, then it could be implemented in other state elections and finally cover the whole country during the 2019 parliamentary elections.
The government move has been initiated at the instance of the Supreme Court of India that is hearing Public Interest Litigations in this regard moved by some NRIs. The court is monitoring the progress in the matter and on 12th April, gave eight more weeks to the government to take further steps in this regard.
Thus far, the government and Election Commission had expressed their preference for e-postal ballot and the Centre had told the apex court that the EC’s recommendation to extend voting rights to NRIs through postal ballots had been accepted by it and for that laws were to be amended accordingly. A committee had been set up to devise the modalities of its implementation. A Press Trust of India (PTI) report suggested that the EC had already constituted a technical committee headed by Rajat Moona of C-DAC, the government’s research and development arm in advanced computing, to develop a software “that will allow the commission to dispatch the ballot paper to NRI voters online”.
So far reportedly 114 countries have adopted external voting and among them are 20 Asian countries.
For long the NRIs had been demanding equal rights to vote. Yet the issue was hotly debated since then. Those who were in favour argued that the participation of the NRIs in the electoral process would encourage them to contribute enthusiastically towards nation-building where their participation is quite significant. Statistics show that NRI remittances to India that stood at $67.6 billion in 2012-13, accounted for over per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This further grew to $70 billion in 2013-14, the highest amongst the countries receiving remittances from overseas workers.
However, a counter argument in favour of denying the voting rights to the NRIs was that they would become yet another vote bank and since they had “negligible” level of comprehension about the current politics, they might be led to favour the “wrong” candidate in the fray.
Such a logic, however, may sound frivolous. Yet there is another dimension to the whole process of voting and electoral reforms. The NRI voting issue has also brought to the surface the issue of voting rights of migrant labourers, who move for economic reasons (like farm work etc.) to different parts of the country. Since they do not reside in their local residence for a period of six months, often they find their names deleted from the electoral rolls and hence they do not vote.
When the matter was taken up by the Supreme Court on 12th April, the Election Commission opposed a PIL seeking a direction to the Commission to make arrangements to facilitate voting done by migrant labours. The EC contended that a person needed to register himself/herself first at the place (s)he resided so as to exercise the franchise.
When the matter was taken up by the Supreme Court on 12th April, the Election Commission opposed a PIL seeking a direction to the Commission to make arrangements to facilitate voting done by migrant labours. The EC contended that a person needed to register himself/herself first at the place (s)he resided so as to exercise the franchise.
It is high time that the EC, the government as well as the judiciary look at the aspect of the migrant labourers, too along with that of the NRIs. After all, the Right to Vote must be treated as sacrosanct in a democracy.
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