Congress staff during the protest against manipulation with the list of voters on Friday in Bengalur. | PHOTO CREDIT: SUDHAKARA JAIN
How the political storm is brewed over the leader of the Rahula Gandhi Congress “The Hett” accusations of the Mahadevapura of the Bengalur constituency, many who have raised concerns for election roles in the past, now demand a thorough investigation by the India (ECI) Election Commission. However, they also warn against the “politicization” of the problem they are worried about, they will only be muddy water and do not lead to any tangible results.
Activists caused problems on the discrepancy of the election role in this election district of this assembly before the elections to 2018 and 2023 in the state, with accusations of suppressing voters and erase voters.
Jagadish Reddy, associated with the Indian National Congress AS Local RWA Varthur Rising, said they were the first to cause a problem with Congress two years ago, which led to a systematic investigation.
“We have seen a lot of anti-summaking at the ground level, but the representatives of the same party continued to win with increased margins. When we pulled out the list of voters from some stalls in Varthur and Whitefield, we noticed that there was between 50 and 100 additions.
A million voters growing
In 2017-18, Whitefield residents launched a campaign called Million voters who got up to get into the election role. However, approximately 66%of the unusually high number of applications were rejected between 2012 and 2018. Then the main election officer (CEO) Sanjiv Kumar ordered the re -stir of all rejected requests. The inhabitants even turned to the Karnataka High Court.
Things have not changed much for these voters, without more than 3,000 of them again in the months leading to Lok Sabha’s elections in 2019. The campaign volunteers argued that there were some “deliberate efforts” to cancel some voters.
“The list of voters of the constituency has always seemed inflated, because participation would always be relatively lower compared to registration data. Now that the question is re -raised, and there is some evidence that manipulation could occur, ECI should get to the bottom of the problem.
Chilum controversy
In 2022, a great controversy broke out when Chilume Educational Cultural and Development Trust, a non -governmental organization to carry out the SVEEP campaign, was accused of collecting voters’ data and parallels to the operation of a political consulting company. Chilume was active in three city constituencies Mahadevapura, Shivaji Nagar and Chickpet.
Congress, then in opposition, claimed that the then ruling BJP promoted several targeted election roles deletions and abused this data. However, the government’s investigation did not find any manipulation of electoral data, but admitted that illegally collected voters were stored on foreign servers. BBMP interrupted all ties with NGOs.
“Need more transparency”
The PG Bhat analyst, who constantly claims that the election role of Bengalur has been inflated and inaccurate over the last decade and a half, said that Mr. Gandhi was right in the election role for his bad state.
“For example, he says there are 11,965 duplicate voters. There are several levels of duplication and have not said exactly how he arrived at this number,” he said, adding that Mr. Gandhi “He should not politicize this problem.
Published – August 8, 2025 9:07
