Massive row in Shivajinagar over alleged voter deletion

The expose also made the Election Commission order a verification of the electoral roll of Shivajinagar by December 24 

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: The ruling BJP has reportedly been pushing for deletion of thousands of names from the voters’ list in Shivajinagar Assembly constituency. The process is sure to affect minority and Dalit voters in a constituency that has at least 40 per cent Muslims. The issue began with a complaint in October by alleged BJP workers or persons sympathetic to the party, claiming that 26,000 voters in the segment are “fake”.

On November 16, The New Minute reported that an NGO, Chilume Educational Cultural and Rural Development Institute had collected personal details of thousands of voters in Bengaluru city by way of a Government Order (GO), which was later withdrawn.

Interestingly, Chilume is in possession of this data, which in theory can be sold to candidates. Since then, it is being speculated that it was Chilume that provided BJP workers with the list of 26,000 voters. The expose also made the Election Commission order a verification of the electoral roll of Shivajinagar by December 24.

The electoral roll for the constituency was published on January 15. About a week later, BJP officially filed a writ petition in the Karnataka High Court (HC) demanding that the 26,000 names mentioned in the original complaint be deleted. The Congress shot back at the BJP, calling the exercise a farce since the roll was already out.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) had laid down Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in September 2021, which held that suomotu deletions cannot be made six months prior to the dissolution of an Assembly, which in Karnataka’s case is in May. This was mooted to avoid chaos on the eve of elections and to retain the confidence of voters.

However, it allows for voter deletions in “special circumstances,” which ECI claims this is. The same has been met with severe criticism. There has been an uproar over the exercise as several norms have reportedly been violated in the process. For instance, form seven has to be filled out for the deletion of even a single voter from the list and the same wasn’t reportedly done for 26,000 voters, which the ECI has confirmed. 

List down to 9,000

The ECI then claimed that 9,195 of the 26,000 voters listed in the complaint had died or moved out. Additionally, notices had been sent to hundreds of people on January 10 and February 15, asking them to appear before the authorities and confirm their address or risk deletion. A recent report by The New Minute found that notices had been issued to persons living in the same house for decades.

On January 30, Shivajinagar MLA Rizwan Arshad wrote to the ECI demanding that the exercise to delete the voters be stopped. He also told News Trail that out of the 9,195 voters that were shortlisted for deletion; nearly 8,000 were either Muslim or Christian.

Moreover, out of the 193 booths in Shivajinagar Assembly constituency, minorities were concentrated in 91, which were being exclusively targeted for deletions, he added.