Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Election Commission of India (ECI) of jointly undermining democracy, the Constitution and the will of the people by manipulating electoral rolls.
He claimed that the ECI was acting at the BJP’s behest and that the ruling party used the commission as cover whenever it faced electoral setbacks. He demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. He also alleged that the BJP was preparing for large-scale fraud in the voter list with the help of the Election Commission and the administration.
Addressing a press conference at the party headquarters in Lucknow, Yadav released a booklet titled “Samajwadi ECI Audit-1”. “Where the BJP is certain to lose, it resorts to large-scale malpractice,” Yadav said, claiming that public anger against the ruling party had made its earlier dominance unsustainable.
“He alleged that in some cases, only BJP members were being enrolled as voters and recognised as citizens. Yadav pointed to discrepancies in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process. In Azamgarh, he claimed, one individual’s name appeared ten times on the electoral rolls. The SP chief accused the BJP of employing multiple tactics to win elections, including adding bogus votes, deleting genuine opposition voters, distributing money and food before polling, intimidating voters on election day, manipulating EVMs, irregularities in counting, issuing victory certificates to defeated candidates and engineering defections to form governments.
The party’s PDA (Pichhda, Dalit, Alpsankhyak) volunteers had identified 19,20,732 allegedly fake voters, according to him. He said the ECI had received 87.56 lakh Form 6 applications but had made public details of only 71.38 lakh. The details of the remaining 16.18 lakh applications had not been disclosed, he claimed, adding that many applicants allegedly shared identical names, ages and relatives’ details. Party workers had also flagged another three lakh suspicious entries, taking the total to more than 19.20 lakh, he said. Yadav listed several assembly constituencies with high numbers of alleged fake voters, including Loni (15,150), Sahibabad (13,903), Mahroni (12,669), Dadri (12,556), Jakhania (12,144), Chaprauli (11,574), Modinagar (10,913), Pharenda (10,282) and Nakur (10,272).
