For nearly two years, entrepreneur and Whitefield resident Satish Gupta has been running in circles trying to register as a voter. So far, it has been an exercise in futility. But, the approaching elections lends renewed urgency to his mission.
Despite several applications — one of which was mysteriously ‘lost’ along with nearly a thousand others in 2015 — local civic officials are yet to process his request. “I feel there is an attempt to disenfranchise some people in Mahadevapura,” he says.
Mr. Gupta is not the only person in Whitefield to feel this way.
The pushback residents of the IT corridor have been encountering while trying to exercise their franchise — even after launching a sustained campaign — has sown the seeds of many a conspiracy theory about deliberate attempts to ‘keep them out’.
Mahadevapura, one of the largest Assembly constituencies in the city and reserved for SC candidates, is defined by a deep demographic divide between locals and migrants, rich and poor. It houses some of the most thickly populated low- income pockets that live cheek-by-jowl with the IT corridor where people live in sprawling gated communities and multi-storey apartments.
Historically, electioneering has followed this line of division, in no less part aided by the apathy of the IT corridor. A ground report by The Hindu during the 2013 Assembly polls noted that campaigning was restricted to low-income pockets inhabited by locals while residents of upscale areas were unaware of even the candidates in the fray.
Change in tide
All that changed during the 2015 civic polls. “We bore the brunt of disengagement with the political process. When we raised questions over local civic issues, councillors and other elected representatives had data of voters in each community and asked us why they should even listen to us. We realised we will not be counted as stakeholders till we vote,” said Zibi Jamal of Whitefield Rising.
This realisation saw the birth of the Million Voter Rising Campaign by Whitefield Rising, one of the most active residents’ welfare associations in the city, to enrol citizens in voters’ list.
In June-July 2015, nearly 1,000 residents filed applications to register as voters in the run up to the civic polls. To their dismay, none of them made it to the rolls while 4,000 others from politically active pockets did, they said.
When they followed up with the BBMP, officials claimed that all the applications submitted in 2015, including online, were lost. This was revealed to applicants, after persistent follow-up, as late as December 2016. Demand for an FIR by applicants was tackled with the promise of a fresh start.
But, the residents have made little headway since then.
Since January this year, there have been 2,414 applications from the area, but only 844 have been processed so far. The remaining 1,570 applications have mostly gone unacknowledged or ‘still under process’.
During the same period, over 6,000 applications from other pockets in Mahadevapura have been processed and the names have been added to the rolls, say sources in the BBMP.
As per the civic body’s estimates, around 30.8% of eligible voters in Mahadevapura remain unregistered, which translates to around 1.56 lakh votes. The number is large enough to swing the result of any electoral battle, especially in a constituency where the margin of victory has always been narrow. In the last Assembly poll, the margin was 6,000 votes. In the 2015 civic polls, the margin in three of the eight wards was less than 600.
Part II: Officials respond
In part two of the series, The Hindu talks to BBMP and Election Commission officials about the concerns of RWAs.
