Muslims make up 20.3 pc of Delhi SIR discrepancy cases despite 13.6 pc share of draft rolls: Report

New Delhi: Muslims account for 20.3 per cent of the voters who have been flagged for “logical discrepancies” in Delhi's draft electoral rolls, despite constituting 13.6 per cent of electors, according to an analysis by The Hindu of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) data.

The analysis also found that Muslims made up 30 per cent of the electors flagged under criteria including the number of children and age differences between generations, raising questions about whether the Election Commission of India's (ECI) verification process disproportionately affects the community.

Delhi's draft SIR rolls contained 97.54 lakh electors, of whom 33.12 lakh were flagged for notices. This included 13.79 lakh voters classified as “Unmapped with Last SIR” and 19.33 lakh flagged for logical discrepancies under eight categories.

Muslims accounted for around 13.3 lakh electors, or 13.6 per cent of the draft rolls. They constituted 7.6 per cent of those classified as “Unmapped with Last SIR”, but 20.3 per cent of those flagged for logical discrepancies, the report said. “For every 1,000 Muslim electors in the draft roll, 318 were flagged for ‘logical discrepancies’, while the corresponding figure for the rest of the non-Muslim electors was 197 per 1,000,” the analysis has found.

The report also raised questions about the role of the ECI's centralized ERONET software, stating that the system was determining which electors were flagged, rather than Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), who are the statutory authorities responsible for maintaining electoral rolls.

The ECI's guidelines specify eight categories of logical discrepancies, including mismatches in names, parents marked as ineligible in the previous SIR, and inconsistencies involving the number of children and the ages of parents and grandparents.

Nearly 60,000 electors were flagged without a specific reason being recorded. Muslims accounted for close to 20 per cent of this group, substantially higher than their share of the draft rolls, according to the report.

The sharpest disparity was found among voters flagged under criteria related to family size. These included having six or more children, a parent-child age difference exceeding 50 years, a grandparent-grandchild age difference below 40 years, a childbearing age gap of less than nine months, and a parent-child age difference below 15 years.

Of the 6.75 lakh electors flagged under one or more of these criteria, 30 per cent were Muslims. The report said Muslims accounted for 58 per cent of the 1.4 lakh electors flagged under the ‘Progeny >= 6’ category, which covers voters with six or more children.

The findings have prompted questions about the design and application of the verification criteria, particularly whether demographic differences between communities could result in some groups facing greater scrutiny.

The analysis noted that fertility rates have declined across religious communities in India, citing recent National Family Health Survey findings.

However, the analysis has also cautioned that the data did not, by itself, establish that the voters had been excluded from the final electoral rolls because of their religion. It noted that the disproportionate representation of Muslims among those flagged warrants scrutiny of how the software applies the criteria and whether adequate safeguards exist to prevent unequal outcomes.

According to the report, the ECI had not publicly explained why individual electors were flagged for logical discrepancies or clarified the reasons behind the disparities identified in the data.