How do election officials conduct door-to-door verification in abandoned ghost settlements where entire communities have fled in the wake of ethnic violence? How do they upload photos of voters’ homes when many of those homes have been burned, bombed or reduced to rubble?
These are among the key questions raised by the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) of Manipur with the Election Commission of India (ECI) in the context of the Special Intensive Review (SIR) of electoral rolls underway in the violence-hit state.
The Manipur Chief Executive Office on Friday wrote to ECI seeking a standard operating procedure (SOP) on conducting SIR for the state’s internally displaced persons (IDPs), senior government officials said, requesting anonymity. There are about 60,000 people from the Meite and Kuki Zu communities who have fled their homes due to ethnic clashes. Because of unresolved ethnic violence, local communities still live in the strongholds to which they have retreated – Meite in the valley and Kuki Zu in the hills provinces. Security forces are guarding the highways linking the hills to the valley to ensure that communities do not enter each other’s areas and indulge in violence.
“The enumeration process for all non-displaced persons across the state is ongoing but for IDPs, it is on hold. We have distributed forms to citizens but not to IDPs. The CEO’s office has told us that ECI will send a message on how to do it,” said an official involved in SIR in the state, requesting anonymity.
The official added that the Office of the Chief Executive had hitherto requested each distinct to appoint special Assistants to Electoral Registration Officers (AEROs) to exclusively handle cases of internally displaced persons, many of whom had no documents and were left behind or burned in the violence that began in May 2023.
“These special bots will help in getting all the documents online. People have left their documents behind when they had to flee their homes,” the officer said. Obtaining their documents is an easy and accomplished task. All records are online. Among the nearly 60,000 displaced people, there are about 18,000 voters,” he said, adding that the main issue is verifying that voters actually live at the registered addresses.
But there are other problems facing census takers on this front as well.
“In the ECI application, the committee has made it necessary to take a photo of the house and upload it. In Manipur, this is not possible because there are ghost colonies in both the valley (the colonies where the Kuki-Zu people lived before the violence) and the hill areas (the colonies where the Meitei lived). In many places, buildings up to 2-3 and 4 storeys high were bombed and destroyed. There is no building in that place,” said a second official involved in the operation, requesting that it not be published.
The ongoing Naga-Kuki clashes are another problem, this official added.
“Although the number of people affected by the violence in Kuki-Naga is in no way close to the clashes in Meite-Kuki, there are many ghost villages in these areas as well. People have left their homes and are living with their relatives in their strongholds. The same problem will arise in this case as well.”
An ECI official said the standard operating procedures would be clear.
“The census forms will be distributed by the ward level officer of the district where these people live. The census form itself provides great convenience to displaced voters, especially those who are already on the last electoral roll. Voters who can locate a family member already on the list after the last SIR are not required to provide any documents at all – they simply fill out the census form and give details of the relative whose name appears in the current list. A displaced voter whose name is already on the list, or his or her parent, added this person, Who requested to remain anonymous, said that “the spouse or brother who appears to him can be enumerated at the camp site without submitting a single document.”
As for the photo of the house, the mandatory requirement will be waived.
“Only when a voter cannot link themselves to any family member on the current list will the AERO request supporting documents – and even then, the ERO has the discretion to overlook loopholes on a case-by-case basis.”
When documents are required, ECI accepts any of the 12 standard documents – the most commonly used are current EPIC card, Aadhaar card, driving licence, Indian passport, bank or post office pass book with photo and current address, pension document with photo, MGNREGA job card, service ID card issued by state, central government or public support units, and unique disability identifier. Any one of these will suffice.
This addresses concerns regarding documentation requirements for voters.
“Once the enumeration at the camp level is completed, each voter makes one choice: to remain on the list of his or her original constituency, or to apply to move to the constituency in which he or she is currently sheltering through Form 6 or Form 8A,” the ECI official explained.
To prevent duplication, all census data collected at camp sites will be shared with polling stations in voters’ original electoral districts for verification, ensuring that no voter appears on two lists at once, and the original electoral district list is updated to reflect the verified status of displaced voters.
ECI has also allowed claim forms to be submitted online without insisting on physical submission of documents – a precedent that gives Manipur’s own Eros system additional flexibility in processing IDP cases where submission of physical documents is difficult or impossible.
Meanwhile, KOHUR has written to the European Commission for Refugee Elections, urging it to issue clarification on how the door-to-door census of internally displaced people will be conducted. Kohor urged the ECI to develop a special displacement protocol to count people who have lost their homes, cannot return to their homes and will not be there when camp construction organizations visit their homes.
Pointing to the fact that 58,821 people are living in 174 relief camps, Kohor said: “The SIR exercise on house-to-house enumeration is designed by BLOs who visit the residence of each voter to distribute, collect and verify census forms before the deadline of June 28, 2026. For a displaced voter whose house has been destroyed, who cannot return to his cabin area, and is registered in a relief camp in a different district or in another state, the normal house-to-house mechanism House does not function as designed…A census model that assumes that a voter can be reached at his or her usual place of residence carries a real and foreseeable risk of differential deletion.
Manipur has been witnessing ethnic unrest since May 3, 2023, in violence that has claimed the lives of more than 260 people and displaced more than 60,000 people.
