Official from Delhi to investigate Rajarajeshwari Nagar case

Chief Electoral Officer Sanjiv Kumar on Wednesday held a meeting with Chandra Bhushan Kumar, Deputy Election Commissioner, deployed by Election Commission of India, to investigate the Rajarajeshwari Nagar voter IDs cards seizure case in Bengaluru.

The meeting took place minutes after Sanjiv Kumar spoke to reporters announcing that a special officer has been deployed to investigate the case. Kumar said that based on his report, it will be decided if elections for Rajarajeshwari Nagar have to be postponed.

“Three election observers and a police officer from outside Karnataka are also investigating the case. Earlier, we thought that our servers were breached and security was hacked. But that is ruled out. All seized voter IDs are genuine. We are not ruling out the possibility of cash transfer,” Kumar said.

Prima facie, the entire seizure under the circumstances give an indication of planned work over a period of time to survey and locate vulnerable electors and induce them through middle man. On an average, 6% is the average voter inclusion, but in case of this constituency it was 10%. The EPI ratio was 75.43%, he said.

Model code of conduct teams acted on a complaint from BJP worker Manjunath Reddy at 1 pm on Tuesday about illegal activities at SLV Park View Apartment, Jalahalli. The team, with a flying squad, recovered 9,896 EPICs and 6,342 voter application acknowledgment receipts. The staff also seized 20,700 acknowledgment slips without Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) seals.

Also, three malfunctioning copier machines and five laptops including one broken laptop, nine mobile phones apart from other documents including PAN cards, ATM cards, driving licence cards, visiting cards, detailed survey formats with family names, electricity meter numbers, mobile details, caste, voter IDs, Aadhar IDs, widow IDs, old age IDs, BPL card details, etc along with photographs of the houses were found from the spot, he added.

Recently, the election commission postponed elections to the Jayanagar Assembly constituency after the death of BJP candidate M N Vijay Kumar.

Election officials admitted that many booths from RR Nagar constituency fall under the critical polling booths list. Kumar pointed out the pamphlets of Congress were also found in the apartment, but it cannot be concluded that Congress was involved in the case.