Mumbai, Oct 30 (PTI) Top leaders of the Maha Vikas Aghadi allies, including Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray, NCP (SP) supremo Sharad Pawar along with Maharashtra Navnirman Sena president Raj Thackeray, will lead the Opposition’s November 1 protest march in Mumbai against alleged irregularities in voters’ lists.
The Thackeray cousins and Pawar held a meeting at the Y B Chavan here on Thursday to finalise the nitty-gritty of the grand joint rally, where senior Congress leader Naseem Khan, Peasants and Workers Party (PWP)’s Jayant Patil, and leaders of Left parties were also present.
Addressing a press conference after the meeting, Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Anil Parab said the protest march will be taken out from the Fashion Street in south Mumbai to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) headquarters. It will be held between 1 pm and 4 pm.
Citizens will not be inconvenienced due to the protest march, he said.
The entire opposition leadership in the state, including Sharad Pawar, Uddhav Thackeray and Raj Thackery, will participate in the march. It will be held in a peaceful manner, and issues like vote theft and irregularities in voter lists will be highlighted, the Sena (UBT) MLC said.
The Maharashtra State Election Commission (SEC) has said there was no provision in the laws or rules governing local body elections for the use of Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines.
Referring to it, Parab said the Opposition was studying the SEC’s statement.
Congress spokesperson Sachin Sawant said the SEC’s argument was not tenable because VVPAT testing was done in one ward of the Nanded Waghala City Municipal Corporation during its elections in 2017.
There is no basis for this argument, he said.
The Congress is completely in support of the joint protest rally as the issue was highlighted by Rahul Gandhi himself. The party leadership will take part in the morcha, Sawant said, but sidestepped a question on whether the party’s state unit president Harshwardhan Sapkal will attend it.
The Opposition parties have been demanding rectification of the electoral rolls and removal of anomalies ahead of the rural and urban body elections, which are to be completed by January 31, 2026. They have claimed that electoral rolls in the state contain around “one crore bogus voters”.
Earlier this month, Shiv Sena (UBT), Congress, NCP (SP) and MNS leaders met the state Election Commissioner and Chief Electoral Officer, to point out “duplicate” names in the electoral rolls across different addresses and assembly segments.
The SEC has, however, maintained that no political party can tamper with the electoral rolls and those corrections and updates on the voter lists are being managed securely. PTI MR NP
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