Interviewtimes 
If the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, political somersaults could follow. Take the special overhaul of summary electoral rolls announced last week in Jammu and Kashmir to prepare the ground for elections, possibly in the first half of next year. J&K Chief Electoral Officer Hirdesh Kumar said the Representation of the People Act 1951 will apply since Article 370 was read in 2019. He said he would open the door for non-natives who typically live in UT to get the right franchise there for the first time. Apart from that, over 23 lakh have reached voting age since 2019.
He estimated 25 lakh newcomers to the J&K poll lists. Kumar got his headline, which lit a fire against non-local voting rights. After a major uproar, the administration was forced to go back to the figure of 25 lakh in an explanatory advert it placed in local dailies and withhold the non-local part while revising the poll results.
Whether non-locals will be included in the list remains to be seen. Something similar happened recently with a sensible proposal to relocate Rohingya refugees to EWS government quarters on the outskirts of Delhi. Had this been done quietly, it could potentially have gone through as the Union Home Office was very heavily invested in the plan. But when a Union minister with no Sangh pedigree tried to earn credits for the government by making a song and dancing about it, backlash from hotheads forced the Home Office to back down and scrap the proposal.
Just recently, the highest political authority in J&K claimed that the UT has no political prisoners, adding that even the head of the Hurriyat conference, Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, is not under house arrest. But when local journalists tried to visit him at his home, security personnel refused them entry. Missteps and missteps complicate matters in a sensitive UT where Delhi has always been viewed with suspicion, even more so after the demarcation exercise. It is up to the center to allay the fear of gerrymandering and bridge the trust deficit. Holding free and fair elections without tipping the scales would be the way forward.
