Owaisi questions EC over Adityanath's claims of 1.27 cr voter deletions in UP

    Lucknow, Nov 12 (PTI) AIMIM president Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday questioned the Election Commission over Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's claim that 1.27 crore names had been deleted from electoral rolls, demanding details of the voters and the reasons for their removal.

     Addressing a press conference here with ASP (Kanshi Ram) chief Chandrashekhar Aazad, Owaisi asked the Chief Election Commissioner and other election commissioners to provide the list of deleted names and clarify the basis of the figure cited by the chief minister.

    "How has the chief minister calculated the figure of 1.27 crore? Let the Election Commission give us the list as well," he said.

     Owaisi questioned how many of those whose names were allegedly deleted were non-Indian citizens and how many had been identified as infiltrators.

     He also cited data on the Election Commission's website, which he said showed that 2.89 crore names had been deleted from electoral rolls, including 46 lakh marked as deceased, 25 lakh as duplicates, 1.3 crore as shifted and 87.19 lakh as absent.

     He sought an explanation for the deletion of each category of voters and asked the poll body to make the relevant data available.

     Owaisi said his party had opposed the legislation concerning the appointment of election commissioners and the legal immunity granted to them, arguing that the selection process gave the government an undue advantage.

     He said he had warned in Parliament that the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls could become a "backdoor NRC".

     Referring to the SIR exercise in Bihar, Owaisi said his party had been part of an alliance with Azad Samaj Party (Kanshiram) and had approached the Supreme Court over alleged discrepancies in the electoral rolls.

    He said his party had submitted 900 names which it claimed had been wrongly included in the state's supplementary voter list and had now filed another petition seeking a review of the Bihar SIR exercise.

     Owaisi also said his party had developed applications to access the 2002 electoral rolls in Telangana, Maharashtra, Delhi and three districts of Uttarakhand, and had helped people at its offices without discrimination.

     He said his party had been raising concerns about the SIR exercise from the beginning and wanted the Election Commission to clarify the claims being made about voter deletions in Uttar Pradesh.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)