Alleging that the TRS government had hatched a conspiracy for a large scale deletion of voters in the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation area, Congress senior leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy demanded that the Election Commission initiate strong action against the Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.
Speaking to the media at Gandhi Bhavan on Monday, Reddy requested the Election Commission to direct the concerned officials not to take note of the earlier illegal deletions, and not to act upon the names identified for deletion and to whom notices were allegedly issued.
He asked the EC to depute a team to inquire into all the allegations, and pending this, for the CEO Bhanwarlal and DEO Somesh Kumar be relieved from their responsibilities, and ultimately suspended from service, using the UP instance in 2001 as a precedent.
Their continuance would prejudice the outcome of the elections, and any attempt to continue with them was unconstitutional and undemocratic, and would cause immense damage to the process of free and fair elections as enunciated in the Constitution of India.
The other subordinates to these two officers could be warned or transferred, he said.
Unlike what happened in UP in 2001 in the case of the illegal deletion of voters in the Thakurdwara segment of the Rampur Lok Sabha constituency, here the Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao had himself set a target of 15 lakh ‘bogus’ voters to be deleted in the GHMC area when he had reviewed the Aadhar linkage program by summoning the CEO Bhanwarlal on July 21, 2015, Reddy alleged.
He also accused the TRS of hatching a conspiracy targeting settlers (35 percent), Muslim minorities (30 percent) and Hindi-speaking North Indians (10 percent). He said that the key conspirators were KCR, Bhanwarlal and Somesh Kumar.
He also pointed out that there were many contradictions which could not be ignored. For example, he said that according to Somesh Kumar notices had been issued to 23.34 lakh voters, 4.78 lakh voters had been deleted and the remaining 22.34 lakh were to be deleted, but according to Bhanwarlal 30.64 lakh notices had been issued, 6.3 lakh voters had been deleted, 10 lakh notices were verified and 19 lakh notices were yet to be verified.
Reddy also stated that there were serious irregularities in the deletion of voters, with mala fide intentions, and with large-scale violations of and disregard for existing rules and provisions. He said that the deletions were made without following the procedure laid down in the rules and in disregard of the directions of the Election Commission.
He also said that in his small sample survey, he had identified 234 voters in the Sanathnagar constituency whose names had been illegally deleted, including three persons whose names were deleted under the ‘dead’ category, but who were very much alive.