Election Commission of India to visit Bihar next week to assess poll preparedness

The Election Commission of India (ECI) is expected to visit Bihar on October 4-5 to review preparedness for the forthcoming Assembly polls in the State.

Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi are expected to be in Patna, where they will hold meetings with the Chief Electoral Officer and other State officials.

Before the visit, a meeting of Observers — General, Police, and Expenditure — appointed by the commission for the Bihar elections is scheduled to be held in the national capital on October 3, a senior official told The Hindu.

As a practice, election dates are announced after the visit of the full ECI to a State. Thus, the schedule for the Bihar polls is likely to be announced any time after October 5. The entire election process in Bihar must be completed before November 22.

This will be the ECI’s first visit to Bihar since the contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls was announced, with the final list scheduled to be published on September 30.

The draft list contained 7.24 crore voters, while around 65 lakh names were omitted for various reasons.

The ECI has already announced an SIR for the entire country, and Bihar will be the first State to hold an Assembly election after this process, in which electoral rolls have been made ‘de novo’.

The Opposition has already been up in arms against the SIR exercise, claiming it was an exercise in mass disenfranchisement. The ‘mahagathbandhan’, led by Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Congress, had earlier hit the streets, alleging manipulations in the voter lists.

The Bihar election is crucial for both the NDA and the INDIA bloc, as it could set the political course for the Assembly polls in five States next year. The Bihar polls could also see the INDIA bloc using the SIR exercise to take forward the ‘vote chori’ campaign to a new level.

The previous Assembly elections in Bihar were held in October-November 2020, after which the National Democratic Alliance formed the State government, with Nitish Kumar becoming Chief Minister.