Uttam cries foul over deletion of voters

​Hyderabad: Telangana Congress president N Uttam Kumar Reddy on Tuesday said that there could be a larger conspiracy behind the deletion of over 21 lakh voters from the electoral rolls of Telangana State.

Addressing a press conference, he expressed serious concerns over the declining number of voters in Telangana. He pointed out that there about 2.81 crore voters in 2014 elections whereas the draft rolls published by the Election Commission of India on September 1, 2018, their number has reduced to 2.60 crore. "Where have over 21 lakh voters gone?" he asked.

Uttam said the decrease in numbers was totally abnormal. "Except for the voters who passed away, all other voters must figure in the electoral rolls in one constituency or the other if they had shifted their residences. In the current year, nearly 8 lakh new voters have registered their names. Therefore, we seriously suspect that some forces have been tampering with the electoral rolls of Telangana State," he said while alleging that thousands of names were also deleted from the electoral rolls during the GHMC elections in 2016. 

He said that all the Congress workers have been directed to check the electoral rolls of their respective polling booths to find the deletions, wrong entries or corrections. The EC has started the Special Summary Revision of Electoral Rolls, 2019, from September 1 and the booth presidents of all 31,600 polling booths have been directed to actively participate in the exercise. 

He said Assembly-level meetings have been convened on September 7 wherein the booth presidents would be handed over the draft rolls with an instruction to cross check the entries by physically visiting all the households. He said mandal and division-level meetings for urban areas will be held on September 9 to undertake the process.

Uttam demanded the Elections Commission of India to ensure 100 per cent correctness of voter lists, to train employees of Telangana in operating Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) and demarcation of Assembly boundaries in seven mandals of Khammam which were merged with Andhra Pradesh before taking the poll process. He informed that Telangana Congress would implead in a petition in the Supreme Court being filed by Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh Congress seeking transparency in the voting process through EVMs. 

Meanwhile, TPCC Election Coordination Committee Chairman Marri Shashidhar Reddy alleged that TRS could fall to any level to win elections. He pointed out that in an election to a Gram Panchayat in 2017, as many as 740 votes were deleted and the seat was won by TRS with a margin of just 18 votes.

Senior leaders including Leader of Opposition in Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir, former PCC Presidents Ponnala Lakshmaiah and V Hanumantha Rao and others were also present.