Initiate stringent action against erring election officials: BJP leader

Hyderabad: Following the widespread discontent brewing on account of the illegal deletion of voters, former National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) vice chairman and senior BJP leader Marri Shashidhar Reddy said, "It is a serious issue that needs to be investigated as to what is the basis for the deletion of the votes."

Speaking to The Hans India, he felt the situation has not changed much even after the infamous en masse illegal deletion of voters in 2015, prompting the Election Commission of India (ECI) to send a team to launch a probe that led to the transfer of the then Hyderabad District Election Officer Somesh Kumar.

He recalled how it was for the second time that the ECI had taken serious note of complaints of selective deletion of votes. It had sent West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Kumar Gupta to carry out a field-level probe to find out whether genuine voters were removed from the lists. The fourteen-member team assisted him with officials, not from the two Telugu states, who had conducted the random surveys and found out that there was genuineness in the complaints it had received.

Early on, Shashidhar Reddy said that ECI had conducted a similar investigation by its Secretary KJ Rao on ‘selective deletion’ of 15,000 voters in the Thakurdwara Assembly segment of Rampur Lok Sabha segment in Uttar Pradesh in 2001. It resulted in the suspension of the district election officer.

He insisted on stringent action against the erring officials who deleted votes without following the laid down procedure and keep up the sanctity of the voter lists.

Meanwhile, a former senior official of the state Election Commission who served in united Andhra Pradesh said that there are two specific articles in the Constitution dealing with processes related to voting. “Firstly, Article 324 lays down the Election Commission's power of ‘superintendence, direction and control of elections to be vested in an Election Commission’. Secondly, Article 325 says, ‘No person to be ineligible for inclusion in, or to claim to be included in a special electoral roll on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.’ Any genuine voter whose vote was deleted illegally could sue the concerned officials. Besides, any evidence was found in violation of enrollment and deletion of votes against Article 325 would land the election officials in deep trouble,” he said.