New Delhi [India], August 15 : Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MP Sanjay Singh on Friday accused the Election Commission (EC) of deliberately deleting lakhs of voters' names in Bihar, claiming that the entire electoral process had been reduced to a farce.
Singh alleged that under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process, 65 lakh voters in Bihar were removed from the electoral rolls. He said many were marked dead despite being alive.
"There is a strange category in Bihar's elections. The BLO has placed lakhs of people in the "Not recommended" category. Truly, the Election Commission has turned the entire electoral process into a joke," Singh said.
He added that in Darbhanga district alone, 2,94,000 voters were put in the "Not recommended" category by Booth Level Officers (BLOs), while in Kaimur district, 1,40,000 voters faced the same fate. "If this work is done in the whole of Bihar, more than one crore votes will be cut when the last list comes," Singh said, adding that 10-12% of votes in some districts risked deletion.
Singh said the Human Rights Commissioner had already questioned the EC over the deletions and demanded full public access to the data. "Do research at the block level, do research at the booth level, do all the data online so that any person can search," he quoted the commissioner as saying.
He further alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Janata Dal (United) were working in collusion with the EC to influence the elections.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court, a day earlier, asked the Election Commission of India to publish on the district electoral officer's website the list of approximately 65 lakh persons excluded or deleted from the Bihar draft electoral voters list, along with the reason for their deletion - death, migration or duplication.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi also asked ECI to give wide publicity of the same through local newspapers, Doordarshan, radio or any official social media platform.
It said a booth-wise list of 65 lakh people shall also be displayed on all the Panchayat Bhawans and the Block development and Panchayat offices so that people have manual access to the list.
This information should also be displayed on the website of the Chief Electoral Officer of Bihar, said the bench in its interim order. The documents should be searchable by EPIC numbers, it was added.
The apex court also asked the Election Commission to obtain a compliance report from all the booth-level and district-level officers and file a compliance report by Tuesday. "Aggrieved electors of Bihar whose names were not included could file their objections by applying with a copy of their Aadhaar card," said the bench to the ECI.
The Supreme Court has scheduled the next hearing on August 22 for a batch of petitions challenging the SIR process in Bihar.