Congress filed 89 lakh complaints during Bihar electoral rolls, EC rejected all: Pawan Khera

Patna: A day before 'Vote Adhikar Yatra' and the deadline for filing complaints on draft electoral rolls in Bihar, Congress on Sunday claimed that they have filed 89 lakh complaints of irregularities but the Election Commission has rejected all of them.

The office of the Chief Electoral Officer of Bihar rejected the allegations and said no Booth Level Agent authorised by any district president of the Congress in Bihar has submitted any claim or objection on any deleted name. It said the Congress has submitted applications to delete 89 lakh names from the electoral rolls.

Addressing a press conference, Congress Media and Publicity Department Chairman Pawan Khera claimed, "The EC through its sources plants stories in media that no complaints are being filed by any party. The truth is that the Congress submitted 89 lakh complaints on irregularities in the SIR to the EC."

However, he said, "When our BLAs went to file complaints, their complaints were turned down by the EC. The EC categorically told our BLAs that complaints could be accepted by individuals only, not by parties."

He demanded that the entire exercise be conducted again, as “large-scale irregularities” cast a doubt on the intentions of the EC.

Khera claimed that more than 100 names each were deleted from 20,368 and 200 names each were deleted from 1,988 while there are 7,613 booths where more than 70 per cent of women's names were deleted.

In 635 booths, he alleged more than 75 per cent of the deleted names in the migrant category were women.

"We have the receipts of these complaints... We hope that the data we have provided will be verified by the EC, and an investigation conducted into that. There is a need for door-to-door verification again to correct these mistakes,” he said.

In its response, the office of the CEO said in a statement that no BLA from the Congress has submitted any complaint in the prescribed format and the draft rolls published under the SIR on August 1 are not final.

The draft rolls are published for public scrutiny and the EC has invited claims and objections from electors, parties and other stakeholders, it said adding any duplication at the draft stage cannot be construed as a "final error" or "illegal inclusion".

If demographically similar entries are found, they are being identified and removed during the claims and objections period, the CEO’s office said. The presence of some provisional duplicate entries in the draft roll does not invalidate the SIR exercise, it said.