New Delhi: Twenty-five million non-resident Indians spread across the world may finally be able to exercise their voting rights for the elections.
Attorney general K K Venugopal told the Supreme Court that a bill to allow NRIs to vote through postal or e-ballots would be introduced in the winter session of Parliament to amend the Representation of People (RP) Act. The top court has given the government 12 weeks to carry out the exercise.
On July 21, the attorney general had told the court that NRIs could not be allowed to vote by merely changing the rules made under the RP Act and that “a bill was needed to be introduced in the Parliament to amend the Act itself to grant the voting rights.”
The court was hearing petitions filed by Dr Shamsheer Vayalil, a UAE-based doctor, and Nagender Chindam, chairman of Pravasi Bharat in London on the issue. The PILs said that 114 countries, including 20 Asian nations, have adopted external voting. It said that external voting could be held by setting up polling booths at diplomatic missions or through postal, proxy or electronic voting. The PILs have been pending for three years.
The Election Commission of India had already recommended that the government take necessary steps to amend the law for NRI voters.
In 2010, during the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised NRIs that they would soon be able to vote electronically. But the jubilation faded when Election Commission made their physical presence mandatory in their respective constituencies at the time of the polls to cast their votes. NRIs could not use their long-fought right because it was not practical and affordable for them to make an exclusive visit to the country at the time of the elections.
The Supreme Court has now directed the central government and the Election Commission to provide details of the steps they can take to ensure that NRIs who are registered as voters can exercise their franchise from wherever they are during the elections.
Welcoming the move, the Abu Dhabi-based petitioner in the case, Dr Shamsheer Vayalil, chairman of VPS Healthcare, said he was given to understand that the ‘proxy voting’ could be implemented within three months of legal amendment to be done by the parliament. Six million NRIs who have already registered their names in the electoral roll, will be the immediate beneficiaries of this move, he said.
Nagender Chindam said, “This is great news and a key milestone in the path of our relentless campaign since 2012. The very idea of NRI voting came from the thought on how we Indians, sitting thousands of kilometres away from our country, could contribute towards its development. Enabling proxy voting rights in such a large scale would be the first of its kind in the world.”
