Calling for the removal of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over alleged SIR irregularities, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday put forth five demands before the Centre.
Kharge, at his opening address at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting in Delhi on Tuesday, demanded Prime Minister Narendra Modi's resignation on moral grounds for "pressuring" the poll panel chief.
His demands included making public the complete data regarding every major change made to the electoral rolls, providing political parties with the electoral rolls and relevant data in a simple format promptly, and an independent and time-bound inquiry wherever evidence of serious discrepancies emerges.
He also demanded the immediate resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar and suspension of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and restoration of 13 crore 30 lakh names that the party claims have been removed from the rolls.
“Most importantly, the voters of India must have confidence that their vote is secure,” Kharge said. "We do not view this issue merely as a battle to win or lose an election. Elections come and go, and governments change, but democracy and the Constitution are enduring. This is the foundation of Indian democracy. We must convey to every citizen that in a democracy, the most powerful person is the ordinary voter -- not the prime minister, the chief minister, or a leader in power," he said.
The CWC also passed a resolution which referred to reports that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had raised objections at least 14 times over 10 months regarding decisions and procedures linked to SIR.
The resolution said that the report validated Rahul Gandhi’s claims of vote chori, adding that the credibility of the poll panel is under question due to the reported concentration of control over electoral rolls during the nationwide SIR.
The CWC also expressed concern over what it described as the constitutional validity of SIR, claiming that the exercise had "already wiped out 13 crore 30 lakh Indians from the electoral rolls". The resolution said the process shifted the burden onto citizens to prove their eligibility, and the current process resulted in "arbitrary mass-disenfranchisement" that could not be reconciled with the guarantees under Article 14 and universal adult suffrage under Article 326.
"An exercise of doubtful constitutional validity cannot be allowed to decide who may vote in the world's largest democracy," the resolution said.
The CWC meeting, chaired by Kharge, is being attended by former party chiefs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, party general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Jairam Ramesh, KC Venugopal, Sachin Pilot, Mukul Wasnik, and senior leaders P Chidambaram, among others, attended the meeting.
Chief ministers of Congress-ruled states -- DK Shivakumar (Karnataka), V D Satheesan (Kerala), A Revanth Reddy (Telangana) and Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu (Himachal Pradesh) -- also participated in the meeting.
