Muslims disproportionately flagged in Delhi SIR

An analysis of Delhi’s draft electoral rolls released as part of the special intensive revision (SIR) process showed that the software-driven check for “logical discrepancies” in their records is flagging a disproportionately higher number of Muslims.

Muslims, who form 13.6% of electors on Delhi’s draft roll, made up 20.3% of those flagged for “logical discrepancies”, and 30% of those flagged under five reasons indicative of family size. Who got flagged was decided not by the Electoral Registration Officers (EROs), the statutory custodians of the rolls, but by the Election Commission of India’s (ECI’s) centralised ERONET software.

Delhi’s draft roll numbers

The Hindu digitised Delhi’s draft SIR rolls, which had 97.54 lakh voters, of whom 33.12 lakh were flagged for notices by the ECI, to study patterns. The latter set included two distinct sets of electors: 13.79 lakh were flagged for being “Unmapped with Last SIR” and another 19.33 lakh for “logical discrepancies” based on eight reasons.

Our analysis shows that Muslims accounted for 13.6%, or roughly 13.3 lakh, of the 97.54 lakh electors (refer to the box for methodology). This is not much higher than the 12.9% representation of Muslims in the 2011 Census.

Among the 13.79 lakh who were “Unmapped with Last SIR,” members of the community accounted for only 7.6%, which meant that higher proportion of Muslims than non-Muslims were able to map themselves with the last SIR.

But among the umbrella category of “logical discrepancies” featuring 19.33 lakh electors, Muslims accounted for 20.3%, which is 12.8 percentage points higher than their share among unmapped electors and 6.7 percentage points higher than their share among total electors in the draft roll.

To put it another way, for every 1,000 Muslim electors in the draft roll, 318 were flagged for “logical discrepancies”, while the corresponding figure for the rest of the non-Muslim electors was 197 per 1,000.

This means that Muslims were 60% more likely to be marked for “logical discrepancies” than non-Muslims.

Interestingly, a similar data analysis for Bihar’s draft rolls showed that Muslims accounted for 18.4% of deleted electors, not much higher than their 17.7% share of the adult population according to the 2011 Census. The concept of logical discrepancies was not used during the Bihar SIR.

‘Logical discrepancies'

The eight reasons for flagging under “logical discrepancies” could be broadly classified into four categories. One, name mismatches with self or with parent. Two, five reasons based on family size or children. Third, “parents marked ineligible in the last SIR,” which only had a miniscule number of 183 names. And a strange fourth, “no reasons mentioned”, in which nearly 60,000 electors were flagged. In this category, too, the share of Muslims was disproportionately higher at nearly 20%.

In the first category, though the share of Muslims was higher when compared with their share among electors, the difference was of a lesser magnitude. About 15.5% of all electors flagged for mismatches in names were Muslims, which is 1.9 percentage points higher than their 13.6% share in the draft rolls.