Five Opposition parties in Assam on Friday filed a police complaint accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of conspiring to delete the names of a large number of genuine voters from the state’s electoral rolls, The Hindu reported.
The parties are the Congress, the Raijor Dal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the Assam Jatiya Parishad.
The complaint was filed at Guwahati’s Dispur police station.
The parties claimed that Assam BJP president and MP Dilip Saikia was involved in the alleged conspiracy and had directed party MLAs to ensure the deletion of the names of “anti-BJP voters” in at least 60 of the state’s 126 Assembly constituencies, The Hindu reported.
The allegations came amid the “special revision” of electoral rolls in Assam ahead of Assembly elections, expected to be held in March-April.
On December 27, the Election Commission said that the names of more than 10 lakh voters were identified to be deleted in Assam after a house-to-house verification process under the ‘special revision’ exercise. The final list will be published on February 10.
Unlike in 12 states and Union Territories, the Election Commission is not conducting a special intensive revision exercise in Assam. Instead, on November 17, it had directed the state chief electoral officer to conduct a “special revision” of electoral rolls.
The door-to-door verification took place in the state between November 22 and December 20. The process did not involve document verification, unlike the special intensive revision.
In their complaint on Friday, the Opposition parties alleged that Saikia discussed the deletion exercise with Health Minister Ashok Singhal during an online meeting held on January 4.
They urged the police to secure the footage from the meeting and to book the “culprits and conspirators” for a free, fair and transparent special revision in the state, The Hindu reported.
Separately, Raijor Dal chief and Sivasagar MLA Akhil Gogoi wrote to the Election Commission on Friday seeking a high-level, independent probe into the January 4 online meeting held allegedly for the purpose of “voter list management”, the newspaper reported.
Gogoi asked the poll panel to secure all digital records and communication logs of the BJP leadership linked to the alleged directive of deleting “10,000 votes per constituency”, The Hindu reported.
He also sought an audit of Form 7 applications filed over the past three months in the state and demanded that the “special revision” process be halted until the matter was resolved.
Form 7 is used to object to inclusion of the name of other persons on the voter list.
The BJP rejected the allegations.
Party spokesperson Jayanta Kumar Goswami said that Gogoi had misrepresented the deletion of names during the revision exercise.
“More than 11,000 Muslims were evicted following the eviction drive carried out at Uriamghat in Sarupathar Assembly constituency of Golaghat district,” The Times of India quoted Goswami as saying. “During the ongoing SIR, names of around 11,000 persons from the constituency were deleted.”
Goswami alleged that the Opposition parties had filed the police complaint to “indulge in Miya appeasement”. “Miya” is a derogatory term for Bengali-speaking Muslims.
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