Aftab is one of the 728 electors in Bela Estate who has been removedBefore Delhi's Special Intensive Revision, one booth covering part of Bela Estate — a jhuggi-jhopri cluster on the Yamuna floodplains in Zone O — had 729 registered voters. When the draft roll was published in August, it retained just one name: a 99.8 percent deletion rate at this single booth.

The booth was part 38 of Chandni Chowk, a seat that saw nearly 38 percent of its electorate struck off in the draft roll. The JJ cluster that has this booth is on the western bank of the Yamuna river.

What makes the Special Intensive Revision in the area more curious are allegations that the exercise here relied not on the usual eligibility criteria – citizenship, age, residence, or disqualification under law due to election-linked offences. According to some local accounts and at least one election official, names were deleted because of the nature of residence – that they lived in an “unauthorised” settlement on Delhi Development Authority land.

Sunil Kumar, Assistant Electoral Registration Officer, said the residents of Bela Estate have neither electricity nor water bills nor pakka houses, and that they live on agricultural land – unauthorised land, in his account, which is why the names were removed. “They don’t have an electricity bill or water bill. They don’t even have a house there. It’s an agricultural land, they are living in an unauthorised system. They can’t say they are proper residents so this is why their names were cut.” 

Asked why enumeration forms were distributed and collected in the first place, he said he would look into it.

The Booth Level Officer (BLO), Garima Arya, was........

© newslaundry