Noting that a poor migrant working abroad has as much right to vote as a well-to-do overseas businessman, a writ petition wants the Supreme Court to intervene to amend a law placing an “unreasonable restriction” on Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) to be physically present in their electoral constituencies to vote.
V.P. Shamsheer, a UAE-based medical professional and recipient of the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, has moved the apex court against what he claims is a law which “creates an inequality between the different economic demographs of Indian citizens living abroad and therefore is violative of Article 14 of the Constitution”.
The law in question is Section 20(A) of the Representation of Peoples (Amendment) Act of 2010.
Section 20(A) had amended an earlier requirement that required a person to be “ordinarily resident” in his native constituency to have his name registered in the electoral roll. Even possessing or owning property was not enough proof of his residence to give him the right to vote.
Dr. Shamsheer, a native of Kozhikode, had himself lost his voting rights due to his NRI status.
Section 20(A) had changed all that when it was introduced in a 2010 amendment to the Representation of Peoples Act. The provision did away with the rigours, and recognised the right to vote of a person “absent, temporarily or not, from his place of ordinary residence in India owing to his employment, education or otherwise outside India”.
But the petition argues that the amendment goes no further. In fact, it claims Section 20(A) short changes the NRI by giving him the right to vote on one hand, but asking him to be physically present here to actually exercise his franchise.
“This paints the entire process of empowerment as a farce as the intention behind the law cannot be fully exercised. A well-to-do businessman living abroad will have the financial ability to travel to India to vote whereas a migrant labourer will not. This runs entirely anathema to the intent of the Constitution as enshrined in Article 14,” the petition said.
This is when, it added, “the number of migrant Indian workers far outweighs the number of citizens of India in the other groups and due to the procedural bottleneck almost all of them will not have an opportunity to vote. For a vast majority of the NRIs, working in a foreign country is not a matter of choice”.
To prove that only a miniscule of the NRI population actually come here to vote, the petition quotes from the data of the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs to show that only 11,000 NRIs have enrolled as voters on the electoral list out of the 1,00,37,761 Indians reside abroad as on May, 2012.
It also quotes a report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance that 20 Asian countries have already adopted external voting practices such as personal voting, postal voting, proxy vote, and electronic voting.
The petitioner was represented in the Supreme Court by lawyer Haris Beeran.
