BJP getting voters deleted from electoral rolls: AAP

Arvind Kejriwal

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Tuesday accused the BJP of getting names of thousands of voters deleted from Delhi's electoral rolls illegally in a bid to win the Lok Sabha elections.

AAP's South Delhi Lok Sabha in-charge Raghav Chadha claimed that about 100,000 voters had been axed from the South Delhi parliamentary constituency itself "unconstitutionally and illegally" at the behest of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"In their desperate bid to win the elections, the BJP is willing to go to any extent and is exerting pressure on various independent agencies to manipulate the elections," Chadha said.

"It is understood that this is part of a motivated ploy to rig the elections and due process for deletion of names from the voters' list has not been followed," he added.

Chadha said that an average of 10,000 voters from every Assembly constituency had been deleted in the last 18 months without following the process set by the Election Commission.

"Approximately 7,500 voters were removed from Chattarpur Assembly segment, 5,800 from Tuglakabad, 12,000 from Bijwasan and so on... We shudder to think the real extent of voter fraud since the 2015 elections," he said.

Chadha said that most deletions were concentrated in booths where the AAP had been winning in successive elections.

"The testimony to this lies in the fact that our Tuglakabad MLA Sahi Ram's four family members do not figure any more in the voters' list without any intimation whatsoever."

Calling it a "murder of democracy", Chadha said this was one reason why the BJP wanted to retain the "services department" and control the officers with threats of transfers and other forms of intimidation.

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