A Congress MLA has moved the Supreme Court alleging widespread anomalies in the electoral rolls of poll-bound Telangana.
New Delhi: India’s average life expectancy stands at 68.3 years, but in poll-bound Telangana, nearly 21,000 voters are aged between 100 and 2017 years. A petition filed in the Supreme Court has cited this bizarre tidbit about voters’ age to allege widespread anomalies in the state’s electoral rolls.
Telangana, which was due to vote in the summer of 2019, is now expected to hold its elections this year-end after chief minister K. Chandrashekar Rao dissolved the assembly earlier this month.
The dissolution came as a special summary revision of the photo electoral rolls, meant to remove anomalies, was underway in the state. It was launched in May, with the qualifying date — the date before which a voter has to turn 18 — set at 1 January, 2019.
However, on 8 September, the Telangana State Election Commission suspended the exercise and ordered another revision with 1 January, 2018, as the qualifying date.
The notification for the second exercise, however, laid out a truncated schedule — the new electoral roll had to be published on 8 October, 2018, as opposed to the earlier date of 4 January, 2019.
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According to the petitioner, former Congress MLA Marri Shashidhar Reddy, the poll panel has maintained a “stony silence” on several representations sent by him. He has asked the court to set aside the Telangana poll panel’s 8 September order that “arbitrarily terminated” the “ongoing special revision of voter rolls”.
He also requested the Supreme Court to direct the state election commission “to urgently take necessary steps to revise the electoral rolls and hear the objections of voters during the pendency of this petition”.
’48 lakh anomalies’
Among the 2.61 crore people listed on Telangana’s electoral rolls, Reddy has flagged around 48 lakh alleged anomalies.
He has claimed that there are close to 30.13 lakh duplicate voters within Telangana, with at least 18 lakh names duplicated in the electoral rolls of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh after the latter’s bifurcation in 2014.
Additionally, he alleged, there has been a “suspicious deletion” of over 20 lakh voters in Telangana (between 2014 and 2018) and a simultaneous deletion of over 17 Lakh voters in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
“In a shocking revelation, it has come to light that there are gross inaccuracies in the voter list including minor alterations in the gender, age, and husband/father’s name so as to create duplications,” the plea read.
“The petitioner, on behalf of the Congress party, raised this issue with the chief electoral officer, Telangana on 7 September 2018,” his plea states, adding, “(The chief electoral officer) later went on record to state that the reduction was largely due to voter migration from Telangana to Andhra Pradesh following bifurcation.”
Reddy said the 8 September order “amounts to an arbitrary exercise of its (poll panel’s) electoral powers due to its retrospective decision to truncate the voter revision process”.
He has claimed that the shorter time frame is not adequate to cure the “mass and serious deficiencies in the voter list that affect… close to 20 per cent of the state’s voting population”.
Also read: TDP, Congress say they are ready for early elections in Telangana
“These deficiencies and fraudulent anomalies in the voters’ list are significant, grave and of such volume that it is practically impossible for most defects to be cured within the one-month timeline provided by the EC,” the petition states.
“It is also submitted that while the earlier order dated 31 May 2018 had granted a fair two-month period for raising and settling objections and claims, the revised order provides a mere two weeks to do so,” he added.
Reddy said the new exercise would “seriously impede the conduct of free and fair elections by allowing large-scale voter fraud and disenfranchising voters across over 100 constituencies”.
This assembly election will officially be Telangana’s first since the bifurcation kicked in. The 2014 election, held in April-May, came before Andhra Pradesh was officially split in June.