The Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) has deleted at least 35,000 voters, primarily belonging to Scheduled Caste, Schedule Tribe, Backward Class and Muslim communities, as collective punishment for squatting on Defence land. The residents however claim that they have all the required documents to prove their stake, and have accused SCB of carrying out the sweeping move without any prior notice. The elections for the eight wards in Secunderabad, along with 56 other Cantonments across the country, are scheduled to be held on April 30.
Cantonments are hybrid institutions for the administration of areas that have a mixed population of military personnel and civilians. The Station Commander of the Army is the ex-officio president of the Cantonment Board, while the vice president is elected by popular vote. The SCB has taken this extreme decision using the Supreme Court verdict in the case of Panchamarhi Cantonment Board in Madhya Pradesh.
In the Panchamarhi case, the Supreme Court while hearing the encroachment of the Defence land upheld the High Court decision to “disentitle the persons living in illegally constructed houses from being included in the voters list.” The decision of the SCB to delete voters enmasse appears to create another conflict between the state government and the Union government, with the Minister KT Rama Rao seeking Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s intervention to restore the names of the 35,000 deleted voters.
Houses in Indiramma Nagar
Cantonment areas are primarily meant to accommodate the military population and their installations. Cantonments comprise both military and civil population. There are a total of 62 Cantonments in India, which have been notified under the Cantonments Act, 1924 (succeeded by the Cantonments Act, 2006). Secunderabad Cantonment has a total land of 40.17 sq km in which 58% of it belongs to the Defence establishment.
The Bharat Rashtra Samiti (BRS) has been leading the fight against the voter deletion, with its spokesperson Manne Krishank approaching the Telangana High Court, challenging the SCB’s decision. In Indiramma Nagar, the slum next to the Begumpet airport, classified as B1 land (under the management of the Union government) close to 15,000 voters have been deleted, allege residents.
“Our entire colony’s votes have been deleted. I had voted during the 2015 elections but my name has been missing along with all our entire colony,” says K Raghu, a resident of Indiramma Nagar. The slum has residents belonging to Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes, Backward Class and Muslims. “We have been staying here for more than 30 years. As we did not have houses we had erected shelters in this vacant land,” Raghu recalls.
Raghu, a resident of Indiramma Nagar
Over the years these residents have obtained all identity cards based on their present address. “We have been paying electricity bills and water bills too. We are residents of this place. The Cantonment Board has plotted to remove us from here. Where will we go now?” a worried Raghu asks.
The Secunderabad Cantonment Board has not issued any show-cause notice before deleting their names from the electoral rolls, Raghu said. “We got to know about the SCB’s decision only after checking the list. We were not informed earlier,” he says. Raghu too has approached the Telangana High Court challenging the SCB’s decision.
Officials in the SCB say that since 2017 they have been warning the residents to vacate the land but their actions were met with opposition from the residents. “In the past too, they had tried to evict us, but we protested by doing a sit-in protest. Now, by deleting our names from the voters list they are trying to remove us,” says Raghu.
The SCB argues that they have been following the Supreme Court’s orders for carrying out the exercise of deleting voters, who have been staying illegally on “occupied lands.”
BRS leader Manne Krishank says that the SCB failed to notify the residents before deleting their names from the electoral rolls.
The Supreme Court’s order also did not mention the deletion of voters of other Cantonments. “It was limited to Panchamarhi Cantonment Board in Madhya Pradesh. Nowhere the Supreme Court asks Cantonments across to implement its orders,” he says.
According to Krishank, there are discrepancies in the SCB’s action. “They did not issue any show-cause notices to these residents. Besides, no District Magistrate issued any order identifying these residents as encroachers.”
But the SCB Chief Executive Officer Madhukar Naik argues, “The Supreme Court order applies everywhere. They are common orders.”
Speaking about how they identified the illegal residents whose names from the electoral rolls have been deleted, he says, “We have maps of the encroached space belonging to the Defence and the Civil Aviation department. Based on that we have earmarked these slums and carried out the deletion.” As per the latest electoral rolls, SCB has a total of 1,32,722 voters across its eight wards after eliminating the “illegal” voters. The SCB has deleted the electoral voter list of 2014.
“We are still in the process of identifying the illegal residents,” Naik tells TNM. Krishank, who also is the Chairman of Telangana State Mineral Development Corporation, says the SCB had deleted 7,000 voters in Rasoolpura, 9,000 voters each in Bolarum and Lal Bazar.
The Cantonment elections would be held by the Ministry of Defence. These are independent of the Assembly or the Parliamentary elections without the interference of the State Election Commission. In Cantonments, elections are held without party symbols. Instead the candidates are issued free symbols.
Strangely, only the BRS is interested in preserving the rights of these voters as no other party has extended its support for the cause. The BRS is poised to win the Cantonment elections banking on the goodwill of the state government’s proposal to merge the SCB with the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation which has resonated with the Secunderabad Cantonment residents.
The SCB has eight wards in its jurisdiction; among them four are “General”, three are “reserved for women and one is “reserved for Scheduled Castes.” The last date for the application for inclusion of names in the electoral list was on March 4.