In the last three months, the Election Commission of India has removed over 29 lakh fake or duplicate voters from the electoral rolls of Madhya Pradesh after the Congress party claimed that there were over 60 lakh such voters. An unhappy Congress approached the Supreme Court, where the commission replied that the Congress is "abusing the process of law’’.
The election commission is clearly not happy with the Congress party’s repeated complaints on the issue. In a strongly worded affidavit filed in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the commission said that “the Congress petition is misconceived and malafide, and an abuse of the process of law.” The commission asserted that it is committed to holding “free and fair elections”, and that the authority to conduct elections lies with it. It also said that the commission cannot be compelled to follow the directives of any particular party or person.
In a 101-page affidavit filed as a reply to a petition by Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Kamal Nath, the election commission said, "no valid and tenable grounds have been shown by the petitioner to justify the grant of the interim relief. Thus, petition is sought to be dismissed outright."
The electoral rolls of Madhya Pradesh have been mired in controversy since the bypolls of two assembly constituencies of Kolaras and Mungaoli in February, when over 25,000 fake voters were reported by the Congress party. Since then, the Congress party has been claiming that the entire voters list of the 230 assembly constituencies in the state have been fudged.
Kamal Nath said that the party has filed several complaints to the election commission along with evidence of every single voter, yet there are thousands of fake voters in the electoral roll. “With these fake voters, we cannot expect to have free and fair polls,” he said.
However, the election commission claimed that they have updated the electoral rolls between January 19 and July 31. During this period “around 24 lakh entries were deleted from the electoral rolls, while more than two lakh photo entries were flagged as unclear/blank/repeated photos”. Out of these two lakh photo entries, as many as 1,04,284 were found to be valid. Only 97,687 entries had to be corrected during the updation of the electoral rolls, the commission told Supreme Court. The latest figure of deleted entries has reached 29 lakh.
Earlier, after Congress leaders Kamal Nath, Jyotiraditya Scindia, former chief minister Digvijaya Singh, Vivek Tankha and Suresh Pachauri jointly met Chief Election Commissioner O.P. Rawat in July, the CEC had sent a special team to Madhya Pradesh to find out the truth behind their claims.
The four-member team dispatched by the election commission conducted preliminary inquiry into the electoral rolls of four assembly constituencies of Narela, Bhojpur, Seoni-Malwa and Hoshangabad. Even as the teams started its inquiry, the then chief election officer of the state, Salina Singh, said, “We already have some 10.30 lakh voters during previous months when the matter was first reported during Mungoli-Kolaras bypolls.”
At that time, 65,893 fake or duplicate voters were removed from Sagar district and 91,610 voters were considered ‘suspicious’ after an internal inquiry conducted by the election staff. Similarly, 45,323 voters were removed from Bhopal, while, in Dhar, 57,408 were fake entries.
Meanwhile, Vikas Jain, CEO of a political startup named Politics.in, who provides data to the Congress party, claimed that the actual figure of fake voters in Madhya Pradesh can only be ascertained if the election commission releases the text copy of the electoral rolls, not scanned copies.
Kamal Nath said that the whole process of democracy is being subverted by the ruling BJP by using the state machinery. He said, “This cannot be an innocent mistake; it has been done deliberately by the ruling BJP through the state government machinery.”
Senior Congress leader and chairman of election campaign committee Jyotiraditya Scindia said that the entire administrative system is under the control of BJP, who had engineered a system of introducing ‘fake voters’ to win polls. He said, “There is an increase of 24 per cent population in the last ten years but the voters increased by 40 per cent. There is a conspiracy and we have every right to demand justice.”
Meanwhile, Salina Singh was transferred abruptly in August and the new officer V.L. Kantha Rao, too, was gripped with the issue of ‘fake voters’.
Last month, the state unit of the Congress party submitted a memorandum to Rao, claiming that they have conducted a scrutiny of 53 assembly constituency from the scanned copy of the voter lists provided by the election commission and found that 17,15,119 lakh voters were fake or duplicate.
According to Rao, the state election office has received some five lakh applications for deletion or objecting to the inclusion of voters' name in the electoral rolls during the last few days. He added that the process of cleaning the voter list is underway. The election commission extended the deadline for corrections in the electoral rolls till September 7 after the Congress registered a formal complaint along with proofs of fake and duplicate voters in 53 assembly constituencies.
So far, nearly 29 lakh voters have been removed from the electoral rolls bringing down the total number of voters from 5.07 crores to 4.94 crores, an officer of election commission said. After the extension of the dates for correction in the electoral rolls, nearly 12.26 lakh applications were registered for seeking entry of names in the electoral rolls.
