Abu Dhabi: The Indian government has started taking steps to grant voting rights to more than 10 million Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) in elections, as directed by the country’s Supreme Court.
Cabinet has approved a draft bill to amend the existing electoral law, which has to be passed by Parliament, officials told the Supreme Court on Monday.
The government revealed this in legal proceedings initiated by an Abu Dhabi-based medical practitioner, Dr Shamsheer Vayalil, and two others.
The first draft of the bill was referred to the Election Commission of India, which suggested certain amendments that were subsequently incorporated in the bill.
The government said the cabinet has since approved the second draft, which will be tabled in the parliament soon, a lawyer on the legal team that appeared in court for Dr Vayalil told Gulf News on Monday.
The People’s Representation Act, which governs elections in India, requires a voter to be present in his or her constituency to cast the vote. Amending this provision of the law is the first step towards granting voting rights to NRIs through e-postal ballot or proxy voting as suggested by the election commission and accepted by the government in the last hearing on January 12.
Although the mode of voting [e-postal ballot or proxy] was not mentioned in the hearing on Monday, the government and election commission had expressed their preference for e-postal ballot several times earlier outside the court, Advocate Haris Beeran said via phone from New Delhi.
Senior lawyer Dushyant Dave requested the court to give the government a time frame to table the bill in Parliament, but the court refused to intervene in government’s prerogative in this matter, Beeran said.
Dave argued for speedy steps as the petitioner’s home state Kerala, where 20 per cent of the population is NRIs, will go to polls next year to elect new state government. The court appreciated the contributions of NRIs in Kerala but did not give any directive in this regard, Beeran said.
However, when the government argued for the disposal of the petitions based on the initiatives the government has taken so far, the court refused it. The court said it wants to monitor the progress in the matter and gave eight more weeks to the government to take further steps, the advocate said.
Meanwhile the Election Commission and the government are working on a pilot project to facilitate voting for NRIs through either proxy or e-postal ballot in the upcoming Bihar state assembly elections later this year, Economic Times reported on Monday.
In response to the petitioner’s application for granting voting rights to about 400 million migrants within India, the government and elections commission said it was a complex issue that needed time to look into it, Beeran said. The court asked the commission to file the report of a committee constituted by the commission in the next hearing, if it is ready, without giving specific time frame, he said.
