E-Paper
‘Demand no further voter deletions be carried out’: Arvind Kejriwal's letter to EC
The AAP chief also accused the BJP of trying to manipulate the election results in Shahdara.
Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner of India Rajiv Kumar, demanding a “stop on any further deletions from the electoral list” in the national capital.
He said it was to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process as the Bharatiya Janata Party sought mass deletions ahead of next year’s assembly elections.
The former Delhi chief minister also said that his party picked a sample of 500 names of the 11,000 that have been allegedly submitted by the BJP for deletions. According to him, AAP found 372 still living at the same address listed in the electoral roll.
He also accused the BJP of trying to manipulate the election results in Shahdara.
What Arvind Kejriwal said after meeting the Election Commission
Addressing the media after his meeting with the Election Commission, where he presented the letter to the CEC, Arvind Kejriwal said the party had submitted 3,000 pages of evidence to the Election Commission, alleging that the BJP was engaged in a large-scale effort to remove votes of current Delhi residents.
"Most of the votes being deleted belong to the poor, Scheduled Castes, Dalit communities, especially those living in slums. For a common person, a single vote holds immense value, as it grants them citizenship of this country," he said, according to PTI.
Kejriwal further alleged that a BJP official in Shahdara had secretly submitted a list of 11,008 voters for deletion, and the Election Commission had begun working on the matter covertly, something he had pointed out in the letter.
"In Janakpuri, 24 BJP workers applied to remove 4,874 votes. In Tughlakabad, 15 BJP workers sought the deletion of 2,435 votes. At Booth No. 117 in Tughlakabad, there are 1,337 registered voters, yet two individuals applied to delete 554 votes--this means they attempted to remove 40% of votes from a single booth," he claimed.
Kejriwal emphasised that AAP had demanded an immediate halt to such mass deletions and called for FIRs to be filed against those submitting such applications.
Kejriwal said that he had gotten some assurances from the ECI. The first one was that no mass deletion will take place before the elections. Secondly, anyone seeking to delete votes will now have to fill out Form 7. And thirdly, before any votes are deleted, a field inquiry will be conducted by the Booth Level Officer (BLO), accompanied by representatives from other political parties.
“We believe this will prevent wrongful deletions," he told the media.
