Submitted 89L complaints to EC during SIR, all rejected: Congress

With only a day left for voters and political parties to register claims and objections against the draft electoral rolls under the special intensive revision (SIR) of voters' list, the Congress on Sunday claimed that the party had submitted 89 lakh complaints of irregularities, flagged by their booth-level assistants (BLAs), with the Election Commission. However, all these complaints were rejected by the poll body, he added.

Addressing a press conference in Patna, senior Congress leader Pawan Khera said despite blatant resistance from the EC to the abovementioned complaints, the district Congress committee (DCC) presidents got the signed and stamped receipts forms from the district electoral officers (DEOs).

However, office of the Bihar chief election officer said 89 lakh complaints for deletion of names were submitted by the Congress district presidents during the past couple of days, but they were not in the proper format. Therefore, it is not possible to go through all applications in such a short span of time (with the last date for recording objections being September 1).

The Bihar CEO said it would seek affidavits from the Congress' district presidents on all these applications and take a collective decision as per its discretion.

Meanwhile, Khera said the poll panel had been issuing daily bulletins claiming that the Congress had filed zero claims regarding inclusion or exclusion of names from the draft rolls, while the party workers have been silently doing their work of collecting objections from common voters of Bihar since the last one month.

He further said the EC had refused to accept complaints and objections from the BLAs, saying the complaints should be from the individual complainants and not from the political parties.

Alleging that the irregularities cast a doubt on the intention of the EC, Khera demanded that the entire exercise be conducted again. "The EC keeps getting news planted through its sources that no complaints are coming from any political party. The truth is that the Congress submitted 89 lakh complaints pertaining to irregularities in the SIR to the EC,” Khera said.

He asserted that in light of these discrepancies, all deleted names must be verified again by the EC. He added that the panel must confirm the status of each such voter by carrying out ‘door-to-door’ verification.