New Delhi: The Election Commission has bought itself time, and given it to voters.
A day after the Supreme Court asked the commission to consider extending the deadline for filing claims and objections in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, the EC extended the window in six states and reopened the process in five.
Under the revised schedule, claims and objections can be filed until November 13 in Maharashtra, November 20 in Andhra Pradesh and Haryana, November 25 in Nagaland and November 26 in Telangana. Delhi's deadline is now November 25.
The publication of final rolls has moved with them. In the five states it is now November 30. In Delhi it is December 22.
The SIR has been the sharpest flashpoint of the past month. The Opposition has accused the commission of striking off genuine voters at scale and has demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The commission has defended the exercise as a clean-up of dead and duplicate entries.
In Delhi, the argument has produced numbers. In the Mustafabad constituency, BJP booth-level agents filed nearly 68 per cent of the Form 7 objections seeking deletions as "objector", all of them against Muslim electors, citing "absent or permanently shifted" or "death". The constituency has seen 843 objections since August 31; of 597 forms filed by third parties, 96 per cent named BJP booth-level agents as the objectors, and 572 of those were against Muslim electors across 24 parts of the constituency.
The extension changes the calendar for the Opposition's campaign too. The INDIA bloc has called a "public impeachment" of the CEC for Friday afternoon in New Delhi, and a rally at Ramlila Maidan on November 1.
The Supreme Court's intervention came as part of a batch of petitions on the revision process. The commission has not said whether the reopened window in the five states will run to the same dates.
For a voter in Maharashtra, the practical effect is a month more to check whether a name is on the roll and to file a claim if it is not. For the commission, it is a narrower runway: the final rolls for Delhi now land three weeks before the end of the year, with the political row over the revision showing no sign of cooling.