More than 27.4% Dalit voters in Bihar have ‘no trust’ in ECI: survey

More than 27.4% Dalit voters in Bihar have “no trust” in the Election Commission of India (ECI), a new survey released ahead of the Assembly Elections due in the State has found. It also shows that over 58% Scheduled Caste (SC) voters in the State thought that unemployment was the biggest issue in the upcoming polls.

The survey was conducted and released by the National Confederation of Dalit and Adivasi Associations (NACDAOR), a conglomerate of hundreds of associations across the nation. It covered a total of 18,581 SC voters from across the State and was conducted between June 10 and July 4, Ashok Bharti, Chairman of NACDAOR told The Hindu. The 2022 Bihar caste survey counted 19.65% of the State’s population as belonging to the Scheduled Castes.

He added that since the Election Commission started its Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the rolls as the survey was underway, one question was put on the survey mid-way, for which only around 8,500 responses could be gathered.

Fear of losing vote

To the question ‘Do you fear losing your vote in the new voter list?’, over 71% of respondents said yes and 23.4% said no with a little over 5% not expressing an opinion.

On the general question of whether they trusted the Election Commission to be impartial, over 27% said no, about 51% said yes, and 21% said they didn’t know.

The survey asked a total of 11 questions such as ‘who is their favourite political leader at the national and state levels’, ‘how is the work of the State government under Chief Minister Nitish Kumar’, and ‘who do they hold most responsible for the caste enumeration that will now be conducted’.

It found that while over 47.5% of the respondents said Prime Minister Narendra Modi was their favourite leader at the national level, 40.3% said Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, and about 12% said other politicians.

Credit for caste census

It further reported that to the question ‘who do they credit for the caste census?’, 33.15% respondents said Narendra Modi, 30.81% said Rahul Gandhi, and 27.57% said Bihar Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav while about 8% said the names of other politicians. Further, the survey showed that about 48% said the work of the Nitish Kumar-led government was “bad”, while about 45% said it was good.

Opinion: The parameters of ‘success’ in Bihar’s poll roll revision

Mr. Bharti told The Hindu, “A lot of people do surveys of Scheduled Castes, but hardly do many of them actually speak to us on the ground. This survey is of Dalits, by Dalits.”

He explained that they went through the process of training enumerators to survey SC respondents across about 49 Assembly segments in the six regions of Bihar, namely Kosi, Mithilanchal, Seemanchal, Bhojpur, Champaran, and Magadh Pataliputra regions.

Mr. Bharti said, “We have actually surveyed people on the ground. There was higher trust in our enumerators. Unfortunately for the question on SIR, we could not cover all respondents because it came midway.”

The NACDAOR conducted this survey in collaboration with political consultancy firm The Convergent Media, and this is the second survey they have put out. Mr. Bharti said the first survey they did was ahead of the Delhi Assembly elections earlier this year.