MARGAO
The Congress has pooh-poohed the claim made by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar that the SIR conducted in Goa was India’s “best SIR”.
In fact, Congress spokesperson Savio Coutinho rubbished the claims of the Chief Election Commissioner with regard to Goa's SIR process by terming the process as the most manipulated revision of electoral rolls, which ended with the deletion of 1,39,634 voters across the 40 constituencies of Goa.
Coutinho demanded that the Election Commission publish booth-wise and constituency-wise reasons for deletions; disclose party-wise and BLA-wise Form 7 statistics, investigate the Navelim applications and empirically test the allegation of disproportionate minority deletions.
He recalled that the Congress party made its best efforts to monitor the SIR process. “Before the SIR, Goa had 11,85,034 electors; at the draft roll stage, 1,00,042 names were excluded. And during the claims and objections period, another 39,592 names were deleted, taking the gross total of deletions to 1,39,634,” he said.
Interestingly, he said that during the so-called "Special" revision, only 12,166 new voters got added as against the 1.39 lakh deletions. A crystal-clear pointer that the SIR concentrated on disenfranchising 10.76% of Goa's pre-SIR electorate, he added.
“Totally disturbed with this repetition of what our national Leader Rahul Gandhi has been consistently highlighting, we submitted a detailed dossier: electoral roll serial numbers, EPIC numbers, BLA documents, complaints, correspondence and lists of electors. Over 90 per cent of the questionable deletions we examined involve minority voters,” he charged.
Citing an instance in Navelim constituency, he said that when the Election Commission rules allow a BLA to submit a maximum of 10 forms a day, with safeguards after 30 submissions, yet nine BJP BLAs submitted 384 deletion applications on January 15 alone.
“If one assumes, purely as a test, that only half of the 1,39,634 deleted names belonged to genuine voters, that is 69,817 voters, which is roughly 1,750 per constituency,” he said.
He added: “In 2017, 11 of 40 constituencies were decided by 1,750 votes or fewer. In 2022, 17 of 40 constituencies were decided within that margin. Across both these elections, 22 of Goa’s 40 constituencies have seen victory margins of 1,750 votes or less at least once. Isn't this enough to suggest that the deletions were wrongful or partisan? It surely proves something equally important: The churn in Goa’s electoral roll is large enough to exceed the margins that decide who governs Goa”.
