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Election Commission’s SIR exercise identifies just 1,600 foreigners on voter lists in six states
Read more here. Know more here. US vice president JD Vance has reportedly reached out to Mohsen Rezaei, a senior figure in Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a former longtime commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The Ramlila contingency plan involves top leaders including Congress leader and the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday won 13 of the 28 legislative council seats that went to the polls across four states and the Congress won one as the Samajwadi Party made gains in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh and the Jan Suraaj Party opened its account in Bihar’s upper House. The polls were held on October 23 through ballot papers but the counting process stretched over almost two days, marked by chaos, allegations and protest. Yet, in at least six states where SIR was completed or is ongoing, the number of suspected foreign nationals – roughly around 1,600 at least – detected till now is minuscule compared to the electorate and the scale of deletions, HT has found. In these states, the size of the electorate is 98.6 million. All roads to Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan will be heavily barricaded and manned to ensure people gathering at the venue for the Congress-led bloc’s November 1 rally do not march towards Jantar Mantar and other restricted zones. Nearly 3,000 Delhi Police personnel will be deployed in and around the venue.
When the Election Commission of India (ECI) announced the special intensive revision in Bihar last year, it mentioned the “inclusion of the names of foreign illegal immigrants” as one of the motivations for the exercise. Vance sent a letter, at Trump’s direction, to Rezaei, to explore whether Washington and Tehran could find enough common ground to persuade Trump not to give a final order for a short, intense attack on Iran in the coming weeks, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. A gate of the Ramlila Ground has been earmarked for safe evacuation, the officers said.
