NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Shivajinagar MLA Rizwan Arshad on Monday wrote to Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Manoj Kumar Meena, alleging that the vast majority of voters in his constituency who have been shortlisted for deletion, are religious minorities and demanded that the process be reviewed. He said that the Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) Ishwar had begun the process to remove 9,195 voters from the electoral roll. He claimed that of them, almost 8,000 were either Muslims or Christians.

The first-time MLA even claimed that the process was against Election Commission guidelines and that it was being done under “political pressure” to “manipulate election results.” When questioned as to how he was sure about this assertion, he said that there were 193 booths in Shivajinagar constituency and that religious minorities were concentrated in 91 of them.

Rizwan alleged that the deleted voters were exclusively from these 91 booths and that the veracity of his claims could be confirmed by objective observers. The MLA said that the voters shortlisted for deletion were disclosed on January 15.

“This is a biased action with malafide intention to deny minorities their fundamental rights to vote and in turn manipulate the result of the upcoming elections,” Rizwan told Meena. He wondered aloud if similar efforts were afoot in other segments across the state. Rizwan took over the Shivajinagar segment from former MLA Roshan Baig and had own by a margin of more than 13,000 votes.

Congress has long held that there had been large-scale removal of electors from the voters list and that the process had been shoddy. In November last year, the party termed the alleged deletion of 27 lakh voters a “big scam.”