New Delhi [India], January 19 : The Congress on Monday alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Rajasthan was conspiring to manipulate the electoral rolls by trying to remove voters who support the opposition party.
The Congress claimed that the secret operations were directed by Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP national general secretary (organisation) BL Santosh.
Addressing a press conference here, Rajasthan Pradesh Congress president Govind Singh Dotasra and Rajasthan Leader of Opposition (LoP) Tika Ram Jully alleged that the process of deleting voters' names suddenly gained momentum following the visit of BL Santosh and later Union Home Minister Amit Shah.
Dotasra said that while earlier everything seemed to be going normally, Santosh visited the state on January 3 and held meetings with party leaders, after which a fraudulent exercise of removing and adding names to the electoral rolls began.
The Rajasthan Congress president alleged that the Congress was already suspecting that the BJP and the Election Commission would collude to extend the SIR timeline to facilitate the removal of names of people aligned with the Congress ideology from the voter list. That is exactly what happened, he pointed out. He alleged that the process of deleting voters' names from the electoral roll was carried out secretly and at an accelerated pace between January 3 and January 13, coinciding with Amit Shah's visit to the state.
Giving details of how the electoral rolls were manipulated, he revealed that thousands of fake computerised forms were printed for every Assembly segment and handed over to ministers, BJP MLAs and those who contested elections unsuccessfully.
He alleged that the Assembly segments won by the Congress were primarily targeted for this operation, which he described as "vote chori". He said that, while, according to the rules, after the publication of the draft electoral roll, a Booth Level Agent can submit a maximum of 10 forms per day, BJP MLAs and ministers submitted thousands of forms to the SDMs with forged BLA signatures.
He added that several BJP BLAs have publicly stated before the media that they had not submitted any such forms and that their signatures were forged. He disclosed that the SDM in his own constituency refused to accept the forms bearing forged signatures.
Speaking to ANI, Tika Ram Jully said, "The SIR program was going smoothly until Amit Shah's visit. After his visit, applications to remove the names of Congress voters began to come in. People are saying they did not file any application. We are going to the Election Commission and also registering a case. They are afraid and trying to come to power by cutting the opposition's votes, but we will not let them succeed."