Kejriwal claims 13 crore voters removed in SIR, seeks CEC's arrest

Aam Aadmi Party national convenor and former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal has raised serious questions over the Election Commission's functioning and changes made to voter lists. Kejriwal demanded that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar be arrested and charged with sedition. He also demanded that assembly elections held in Delhi, Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh be cancelled and held afresh.

According to Kejriwal, something is amiss in the decisions taken by the Election Commission over the past year. Gyanesh Kumar has clarified in response to the claim, saying all the commission's decisions were taken with complete consensus. Kejriwal also raised questions over the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) carried out in Madhya Pradesh and demanded it be cancelled. He said large-scale changes had been made to voter lists across the country during this revision, and demanded that all such changes made over the past three years be cancelled and the old voter lists restored.

Kejriwal claimed that more than 13 crore names have been removed from draft voter lists across the country. He demanded that the Election Commission respond publicly to these changes. He said the matter was not limited to any one state but was a larger issue concerning the election process and democratic rights.

Kejriwal alleged that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar was running the entire Election Commission alone. He said Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had reportedly raised several objections. According to Kejriwal, both commissioners repeatedly questioned orders and correspondence being issued without the commission's approval.

Kejriwal said the two Election Commissioners had recorded at least 14 written objections over the past 10 months. These objections concerned issues such as registration of new voters, removal of names, the IT system linked to voter lists and centralisation of powers. The objection raised by the two commissioners over including SIR-related questions in Form 6, which was reportedly called "illegal" and "unauthorised", was also part of this.

The Election Commission has said it is normal for institutional discussions to include differing views and comments, and that all decisions taken by the commission over the past year were taken by consensus. Kejriwal's demand is that if such objections and letters genuinely exist, the commission should respond to them publicly.

Kejriwal alleged that control over decisions related to voter lists had been shifted away from the local Electoral Registration Officer (ERO) level to the central level and into the hands of Election Commission officials based in Delhi. Citing the ECINet software, he referred to 97 voters in Goa who had been found eligible by the local ERO, but whose eligibility was not entered into the software.