look news india
The issue of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and purification of voter list has become hot in the politics of Uttar Pradesh just before the upcoming assembly elections. After Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath expressed deep concern over deletion of names from voter lists and large-scale discrepancies, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has now prepared a huge election action plan at the grassroots level. Giving a boost to the preparations for the upcoming elections, the party organization in the state has decided to launch a massive ‘Voter Addition Campaign’, under which a target has been set to add the names of at least 50 new and missing eligible voters to the list at every polling booth in the state.
This entire strategy was finalized in the presence of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, State President Pankaj Chaudhary, Organization General Secretary Dharampal Singh and both the Deputy Chief Ministers during a high-level state level workshop organized at Indira Gandhi Pratishthan in the capital Lucknow. This mega campaign of the party is primarily to ensure that no genuine and eligible citizen is deprived of the franchise.
According to the action plan prepared by the Bharatiya Janata Party, this special voter verification and name addition campaign will be run for a whole month starting from 17th November till 16th December. With the publication of the draft voter list by the Election Commission, party workers and officials will go door-to-door to speed up this campaign.
An army of party workers will be deployed at more than 1 lakh 73 thousand polling booths in Uttar Pradesh. With the target of adding the names of at least 50 new or missing eligible voters at every booth, the party is preparing to add more than 86 lakh new voters across the state. Regular monitoring of this entire process will be done directly by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and senior officials of the state organization.
Recently, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had expressed deep concern in administrative meetings and forums that names of a large number of voters were missing from the list during Special Revision (SIR). While presenting the figures, CM Yogi had said that there is a huge difference in the figures of Panchayat voter lists and Assembly voter lists, in which a large number of people are included whose names are in the list of local bodies but are missing from the final list of the Assembly.
The party believes that this includes a large number of common citizens and especially beneficiaries of government schemes, women and youth who want to vote but their names have been deleted due to technical glitches or irregularities in the lists. BJP is now finding such missing voters by matching ration card data, panchayat lists and records of beneficiaries of government schemes.
To make this campaign effective, BJP has decided to focus specifically on eight major categories of voters:
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New Young Voters: To connect the youth in the age group of 18 to 25 years who will exercise their franchise for the first time.
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Married women: Such women who came from their maternal home to their in-laws’ home after marriage, whose names have not been updated in the list at either place.
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Beneficiaries of the schemes: Those eligible beneficiaries of the welfare schemes of the Central and State Government whose names have been left out of the list due to some reason.
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Missing names from Panchayat list: Those rural voters whose name is present in the voter list of Panchayat elections but is not in the assembly list.
The party’s Yuva Morcha, Mahila Morcha and local booth committees are being given training to fill Form-6, Form-7 and Form-8 duly so that there is no inconvenience in adding the names of eligible people, registering objections or making amendments.
Political analysts believe that in the most politically sensitive and big state like Uttar Pradesh, the purification process of voter list before the assembly elections becomes a major factor in victory or defeat for any party. On one hand, while the opposition is raising questions on the functioning of the government and the Election Commission regarding this process, on the other hand, the ruling party BJP has entered the field with full aggression and adopted the strategy of strengthening its presence at every booth.
This campaign will not only test the strength of BJP’s organizational structure, but will also decide how successful the party is at the grassroots level in taking its traditional and new voters safely to the polling booths. A detailed review of this campaign will be conducted on December 13, which will make it clear how close the party has come to its target of adding 86 lakh new voters.