New Delhi [India], October 11 : Responding to the "vote theft" accusation made by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi against the BJP, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has urged opposition parties to keep a close eye on every move of the ruling party at the Centre. However, he distanced himself from the specific allegations made by the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, stating, "I can't speak on behalf of Rahul Gandhi and his party."
"I can't speak on behalf of Rahul Gandhi and his party. They are capable. I believe that if I have to defeat the BJP, the way the BJP fights elections, these people work 24 hours a day. Our job should be to keep an eye on their every move," Owaisi said in an interview with ANI.
He reminded the opposition parties that they are competing with the BJP, a "formidable political opponent", and warned them against the laxity in the scrutiny of voter lists.
"This happened with the voter list in my constituency in 2009 or 2014. We went and wherever there were duplicate entries, we challenged them. You're competing with the BJP; it's a formidable political opponent. You blink, and these people will do their work, so obviously, we must be vigilant. And we must check the voter list, check the names," he added.
So far, Rahul Gandhi has done two press conferences as part of his "vote theft" expose.
At the August 7 press conference in Delhi, he cited electoral data for Mahadevapura, a part of the Bangalore Central parliamentary constituency, and claimed that the voter list had more than 100,000 manipulated entries, including duplicate voters, invalid addresses, and bulk registrations of votes at single locations.
In the second press conference in September, he mounted a scathing attack on Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing him of protecting those who were "destroying" Indian democracy by refusing to share technical details of the people who were behind an attempted voter deletion from Aland Assembly Constituency in Karnataka.
Meanwhile, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi has also targeted Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Bihar, saying that the exercise was done in "a hurry" and that checking citizenship is the mandate of the Home Ministry.
Owaisi said that if those whose names were deleted don't check, "you'll see there'll be another uproar on polling day".He said AIMIM's Bihar unit chief Akhtarul Iman had moved the Supreme Court over the SIR.
Bihar will go to the polls in two phases on November 6 and 11, and votes will be counted on November 14. The Election Commission announced the poll dates after the completion of SIR.
Owaisi stated that 65 lakh names were removed in the draft electoral roll, and now the Election Commission has removed an additional 3.5 lakh voters.
He said Bihar is a large state with a vast rural population, and the Election Commission announced the SIR exercise only in June.
"SIR is an issue. On behalf of our party, Akhtarul Iman, the president, personally went to the Supreme Court. If those whose names were deleted don't check, you'll see there'll be another uproar on polling day. 650,000 names were removed. Now, the Election Commission has removed another 350,000...Now, the 350,000 will have to be checked again. What we're saying is, what was the hurry? You could have taken your time," Owaisi said."So, there was so much pressure on the BLOs, and the dangerous thing is that they wrote in the notification that if they go to someone's house two or three times and don't find the voter, then the voter will inform their ERO, or the ERO will inform the competent authority under the Foreigners Citizenship Act. So, tell me, how will this happen? So, it has nothing to do with this - it is not your job to check citizenship. So, that is the job of the MHA," he added.
The Election Commission had published the final electoral roll for the Bihar assembly elections last month, following the completion of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The total number of electors in the final list stands at 7.42 crore, while there were 7.89 crore electors as of June 24 this year.