Congress, BRS Yet to Fully Deploy Booth-Level Agents; MIM Launches Awareness Drive

Hyderabad:City poll officials covered 41 percent of voters as part of the pre-SIR (special intensive revision) mapping exercise; yet all mainstream political parties, except the All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslims, have failed to involve their booth-level workers in the routine but controversial exercise of voter verification.

The Congress was highly critical of the SIR and accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of forcing voter wipeout, especially among Muslims, but neglected the pre-SIR practice and did not even submit the list of cabinet-holding agents to the Election Commission. Same is the case with Bharat Rashtra Samithi.

“We have seen the bitter experience faced by Muslims and other minority voters in West Bengal and we are sure that the BJP is trying to repeat it in Telangana,” a senior MIM leader said, explaining the mass awareness program launched by the party in the city and especially in the Hyderabad Lok Sabha constituency.

Only recently did the Congress and the BRS begin the process of appointing representatives to the polls. “If political party representatives play an active role, identifying voters and their place of residence becomes easier because they have micro-level information about the voters,” a senior official told Deccan Chronicle.

The pre-SIR work focuses primarily on matching the electoral list on January 1, 2025, with the list in 2002, when the last SIR was conducted. Matching will mean verifying the voter’s name in both lists and verifying the voter’s name with their parents’ names if their name is not included in the previous list.

The common experience of booth level officers (BLOs) has been that voters over 40 years of age do not face problems in case of migration as their names are traced in the same constituency or elsewhere.

“Those who registered as voters after 2002 will be matched with their parents,” said K. Chandrakala, additional commissioner of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, which is in charge of the SIR here. Allaying fears over the exercise, the official said it was a routine exercise that would help eliminate duplication and dead and fake voter names.

Although the pre-SIR exercise took months and only 21 per cent of the electorate could be covered till a month ago, it gained momentum after the end of Chandrakala with AC (elections) and doubling of coverage. Officials were of the opinion that another 20 percent voter ratio would be determined when the real SIR process starts on June 25.