- Economist Parakala Prabhakar joins October 23 protest.
- Protest demands CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over SIR.
- Prabhakar describes SIR as
- Demands include CEC’s removal, scrapping SIR, restoring deleted voters.
Economist Parakala Prabhakar, husband of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, is set to join a protest on October 23 demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
The protest has been called by People Against SIR, an alliance formed on October 14 comprising organisations representing students, youth, farmers, workers, women, Dalits, tribals, minorities, persons with disabilities, transgender people and others.
The alliance has announced a people’s march on October 23 with the stated aim of “restoring democracy and creating Jantar Mantars all over the country”. Its slogan is “Har haath mein tiranga, har gali mein Jantar Mantar”, meaning a tricolour in every hand and a Jantar Mantar in every street.
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Prabhakar will share the stage with Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, actor-activist Prakash Raj, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan and All India Students’ Union president Neha Bora. Farmer leader Rakesh Tikait, author Tushar Gandhi and former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Aishe Ghosh are also expected to join the protest.
The alliance has called on parties in the INDIA bloc to participate in the demonstration.
Its demands include the removal and prosecution of CEC Gyanesh Kumar, scrapping the SIR process and restoring the names of all deleted voters to electoral rolls.
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Prabhakar Criticises SIR Process
Prabhakar has strongly criticised the SIR exercise, describing it as a “bloodless political genocide of citizenship”. He has argued that, unlike instances in countries such as Germany and Rwanda where people were persecuted on grounds including ethnicity, religion, language or colour, the process in India involved what he described as the targeted deletion of people from electoral rolls to deprive them of voting rights.
According to Prabhakar, the SIR process is resulting in large-scale disenfranchisement and creating two categories of people in the country: those who retain their voting rights and those who do not.
He has argued that people whose names are removed from electoral rolls remain citizens but lose a significant feature of citizenship when they are denied the right to vote.
Prabhakar has also said that a fundamental transformation of India’s culture and society could have implications for the economy. He has called for an association of voters whose names have been deleted to work towards restoring their voting rights.
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