Congress alleges EC Is acting as BJP arm, questions SIR process

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh alleged that the Election Commission is functioning in a partisan manner and claimed the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls was aimed at manipulating voter lists to benefit the BJP

New Delhi: The Congress on Sunday alleged that the Election Commission is functioning as an “arm of the BJP” and claimed that the SIR was part of the “Modi-Shah strategy” to “manufacture a majority” by manipulating the electoral rolls.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh asserted that nobody is against the process of electoral roll revision but what is being opposed is the manner in which the Election Commission (EC) is “managing, coordinating, and manipulating” the entire process.

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The EC has all along maintained that the poll roll revision was aimed at removing dead, duplicate, shifted and absent voters as well as foreign nationals.

Referring to the letter written by opposition parties to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Ramesh said 24 parties, including the DMK and AAP, highlighted their concerns about the way SIR is “devastating” the electoral democracy and the blatantly partisan role of the EC which is “acting, behaving, functioning and operating like department of the BJP”, taking “its orders” from Home Minister Amit Shah and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“We are appealing to the conscience of the chief justice of India. The Supreme Court has a very vital role to play in ensuring that the Election Commission functions in a transparent, accountable, non-partisan manner that is one of our demands,” Ramesh told PTI Videos.

The Supreme Court has a very vital role in ensuring that the SIR process does not lead to mass disenfranchisement, mass deletions of people who are basically Indian citizens, he said.

Who can argue with the proposition that only Indians must vote in India, he said. “When Indian citizens are being deleted from the electoral roll running into lakhs and lakhs of Indians that calls into question the very objective of the SIR,” Ramesh said.

He alleged that after Prime Minister Modi could not get a majority in 2024 and “became a minority PM”, they hit upon this instrument of SIR.

“It started in June-July of 2024. It happened in Bihar, Maharashtra and then Haryana, West Bengal and now it is happening in all states. So this SIR was part of this conscious BJP, Modi-Shah strategy to manufacture a majority and to manipulate the electoral roll in a manner that you disenfranchise a large number of people who would naturally have voted for parties other than the BJP,” Ramesh said.

“This is a vote chori on a gigantic scale,” he alleged. On SIR exercise in Karnataka, Ramesh said, “We had meeting with all the Karnataka MLAs. We had a Zoom meeting on the issue. Their (BJP) objective is to ensure that 5,000 to 10,000 votes in every Assembly constituency get deleted. But we are very active. We have two years until the elections in Karnataka. We are taking all the necessary steps to ensure that all the due diligence required by our party organization is being done.”

“We have concerns. We want to make sure that the SIR process has started properly. We also want to make sure that what the BJP is able to achieve in Bihar is not repeated. It (BJP) won the West Bengal election only because lakhs and lakhs of people who would normally have voted for the TMC were removed from the electoral rolls,” Ramesh said.

He said that nobody is against the process of electoral roll revision.
“We cannot be, because the electoral roll has to be revised periodically. What we oppose is the manner in which the Election Commission is managing, coordinating, and manipulating the whole process,” he said.

The EC is functioning as “an arm of the BJP”, Ramesh said, adding that it is functioning as an “adjunct office” of the home ministry controlled by the home minister.

“It is extraordinary, it is a constitutional body and the way they talk, the way they approach opposition parties, they have nothing but contempt for all of us,” he said.

The EC has rolled out phase 3 of the SIR of electoral rolls in 16 states and three Union Territories involving 36.73 crore voters in a phased manner.

The states and UTs where the SIR is being carried out are Delhi, Odisha, Mizoram, Sikkim, Manipur, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Chandigarh, Telangana, Punjab, Karnataka, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Nagaland, Tripura, Dadar and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. Punjab, Jharkhand, Karnataka and Telangana are opposition-ruled among the states where the SIR exercise is being held.

The SIR has already been conducted in Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Puducherry, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.